Peter King - The Antimodern Condition - An Argument Against Progress (2014)

The Antimodern Condition
When a man wishes to take the world and make something of it,
I perceive that this will only end in failure.
The world is an instrument regulated by the gods,
And cannot be fabricated into something else.
He who tries to do this will damage it.
He who tries to grasp it will lose it.
Lao Tzu
In memory of my dear brother and best friend,

Ian Paul King
(1958–2012)
An Argument Against Progress
Peter King
De Montfort University, UK
© Peter King 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Peter King has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

King, Peter, 1960-
The antimodern condition : an argument against progress / by Peter King.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-0906-5 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-0907-2 (ebook) -- ISBN
978-1-4724-0908-9 (epub) 1. Progress--Philosophy. 2. Civilization, Modern--Philosophy.
3. Civilization, Modern--Social aspects. I. Title.
HM891.K56 2014
303.44--dc23
2013034126
ISBN 9781472409065 (hbk)
ISBN 9781472409072 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472409089 (epub – ePUB)
III
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
1 Backwards 13
2 Forgetting 29
3 Absurdity 49
4 ‘I’m good’ 61
5 Complacent 73
6 Acceptance 81
7 The Antimodern Condition 109
Conclusion 119
Bibliography 123
Index 127
This page has been left blank intentionally
Preface
This is a book that I have wanted to write for a long time. I have been collecting
material, and the ideas have been percolating, for nearly 15 years. Some of the
material was written near the start of the process, some in the middle of the last
decade and some is the result of reading and thinking over the last couple of years.
The idea of the antimodern has been developing and appearing in diverse forms in
my work over the years, often without being explicitly names, but it is only now
that I have felt able to pull the various strands together to form what I hope is a
coherent narrative. This means that I am dealing with issues I have considered
before and some of this material has previously been presented in different forms.
So this work seems to me something of a culmination – this is my core
philosophy as it now stands for good or ill – but also I have seen this project
as underlabouring or as providing a more general argument through which my
more policy-related work can be viewed. Of course, I am aware that this may only
matter to me, and I cannot, and should not, expect others to view my work as a
whole. But I feel it to be personally important: this is an opportunity to present an
argument and to use all those sources that mean much to me in doing so.
I have been fascinated with the idea of the antimodern since I discovered
thinkers such as Burke, de Maistre and Hamann and came to realise that they
were saying much the same sort of thing as the postmodern thinkers that I had
been reading since the mid-1980s. However, not only did they say it first, but
they said it better. Postmodern thought, I now realised, had nowhere to go and
this was because it was based on a false premise, namely, that one could pick and
mix traditions and then by stirring this mixture into the modern this would create
something new. I saw that anything did not go and that when one tried the result
was often a mess. And so I began to focus on the antimoderns and the more I read
of them, the more fascinated I became and the more I realised the deficiencies
of the modern and postmodern thought that dominated the academy. As I have
indicated, some of this thinking has percolated into my previous books, sometimes
in a rather oblique manner. In particular, the three books I have written on dwelling
(King, 2004, 2005, 2008) show elements of this antimodernism, and several of the
viii The Antimodern Condition
concepts that I worked out in the writing of these works are presented here in a
more general manner.
The key concept in this book is that of acceptance, whereby, instead of striving
for the new and aspiring to what we might be, we accept what we are and where
we are. Intrinsic to this notion is the sense that we are not distinct from the world
but are part of it. We are not separated subjects who can distinguish ourselves from
the world around us. We are what we are and we are where we are. We can fight
against this, perhaps in the name of progress, or because we are unhappy with our
lot. However, the attempt to distinguish ourselves – to attain what may well be
unattainable – is dangerous both to us and to the world around us. I wish to argue
that it is far better for us to accept our place.
As will become clear, this call for acceptance is not particularly a concern
for the material. I am not arguing that we shoould completely eschew material
progress. What I am concerned with is the idea of progress as an end in itself, as
something that is necessarily good. I wish to counter the argument that we should
always be aspiring. It is my view that what we have now is often the best we can
hope for, and this is precisely because it is where we are meant to be: it is our
place, and so we should accept it.
This book is, of course, my own particular take on the antimodern, and I am
conscious that it might differ markedly from that of others. In particular, I am all
too aware that some who adhere to the label of antimodern, or similar ones, such
as traditionalist or conservative, may well take issue with what I have not said, as
well, of course, with what I have.
In terms of what I have said: first, there is a distinct phenomenological
bent to certain chapters. Even though I have discarded much of the baggage of
contemporary European philosophy, I still find elements of the phenomenological
approach congenial. Those who have read my previous works will note this.
Second, the choice of writers on whom I have based several of the chapters,
such as Vladimir Solovyov, René Guénon and E. M. Cioran, is personal and
idiosyncratic. I make no claim that these writers would agree with each other or
are mutually compatible in any way other than that they help me to build what I
see as a coherent argument. I am sure they would not agree with much of what
I have said, including my interpretations of their work, and I see no reason to be
worried by this. More generally, I do not wish to claim that all of the writers on
whom I rely are antimodernists and again I do not see this as an issue any more
than one should question the use of the work of conservatives such as Heidegger
and Hegel by radicals such as Derrida and Žižek. But I also do not follow any
Preface ix
of these writers slavishly or adhere completely to their ideas. For instance, there
are elements of Guénon’s work that I cannot subscribe to, such as his criticism of
ordinary life and the emphasis he places on initiation. Again, I do not see that this
matters.
The third area in which some might take issue with me is my use of fiction
as a key source. I appreciate that the use of examples from literature and film is
unconventional, at least so far as a book on politics is concerned. However, in
terms of wider social thought it is not, and it is an approach I have often used
before and that I see as a fruitful way of undertaking cultural critique. It would not
be sufficient perhaps on its own, but then this is not the case here.
So I have not confined myself to the usual apparatus of the political theorist.
All of my work, including my doctoral research, has been cross-disciplinary, and I
find it hard to take on an issue without using a wide range of techniques to address
it. What matters is the resulting work and not whether it fits neatly into a particular
silo. Certain parts of the book deal with issues I have attended to before but within
a different context. My earlier interest has been in examining the notions of home
and dwelling, and this led me to develop a number of concepts, such as acceptance
and complacency. In this book I have sought to return to these concepts and to
develop them in a more general context.
And so on to what I have not discussed in the book. The main issue for the
more conventional political theorist, I suspect, would be the relative lack of
engagement with the other alternatives to modernity, particularly postmodernity
and post-structuralism. But as I explain in the introduction, there is already
no shortage of critiques of modernity and treatises on the postmodern. I have
referred to this work where I felt it necessary and then sought to focus on my own
argument, which, I would suggest, is heard rather less frequently. It is ironic, but
also a fact, that most academic political and social scientists are conservative and
establishment-focused, finding it difficult to leave the sanctuary of ‘the literature’,
perhaps believing they would be cursed and damned eternally were they to do so.
The result of this fear, of course, is homogeneity and an intolerance of difference,
with all work tending to use the same sources and arriving at similar conclusions.
The second gap is one that will doubtless be noticed by those on the largely
non-academic right, who have particular expectations of what an antimodern,
traditionalist or conservative position ought to consist of. This relates to the virtual
absence of any discussion of race and nationality in the book, concerns which
seem to dominate the thinking of many on the right. Again this absence is due
in part to my background and my training. While I have some difficulties with
x The Antimodern Condition
aspects of multiculturalism (mainly as a result of working in the area during the

Satanic Verses controversy in the late 1980s), the idea that we have a shifting and
dynamic population does not concern me. This, after all, is quite normal (as, of
course, is the concern over its effects). But also, having been brought up, living
and working in cities such as Peterborough, Bradford and Leicester the idea of an
‘alien’ population just seems to me to be absurd and based on an irrational fear
rather than any solid argument.
Indeed I would suggest that the focus on race and nation is a serious handicap
to the acceptance of antimodern ideas and the sooner they are left behind, the
better. The high profile given to race tends to drown out any other ideas and allows
the left to dismiss all antimodernists and traditionalists as bigots, petty nationalists
or closet fascists. The sophisticated thought of writers such as Edmund Burke,
Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton finds itself linked to race-based ideologies that it
actually has nothing in common with.
But the problem is more fundamental, in that, as Eric Voegelin (1997) has
argued, the notions of race and nation as expressed by many traditionalists and
conservatives are themselves modernist constructs. They are derived from post-
Westphalian political thought and have little to do with pre- and antimodern
ideas that are based instead on the notions of community and local affiliation.
These latter concepts are very different from those of race and nation used by
contemporary commentators on the right. Hence I make little or no reference to
thinkers such as Alain de Benoist or Julius Evola in this book, as I take them to
be largely inspired by modernist notions that have little to do with antimodernist
thought as I see it. I am all too aware that this will not be seen as an acceptable
argument by some on the right, and indeed some of the discussions I have had on
these issues have been vitriolic and even unpleasant. I have been referred to as a
‘cultural Marxist’ for not toeing the line on race. So I am aware that it is a difficult
subject, but I am sure that my position is a coherent and justified one and it is my
earnest hope that it is one that will gain ground.
I also find myself out of favour when it comes to the terms ‘radical’ and
‘revolutionary’. There are some traditionalists and conservatives – often the same
ones as those discussed above – who see no contradiction in applying the ‘R’
words to themselves. But again, I see these words as being incompatible with the
antimodern view, at least one that is based on Western values that are adhered to
in the UK, USA and Europe. If one is to base one’s politics on tradition, stability
and acceptance of the world as it is, then I find it hard to see how one can claim
to be either a revolutionary or a radical: these are terms intrinsic to the modernist
Preface xi
mind-set. We exist within a tradition based largely on quiet change, and one in
which dissent and argument are contained within the bounds of a civilised social
order, and this limits the responses we can make if we wish to see ourselves really
as conservatives or traditionalists. Most certainly there are radical traditions in the
West, but these should not be confused with conservatism or antimodernism.
It is easy to discount the idea of a ‘revolutionary conservative’, in that the
term is clearly an oxymoron: one can use one or the other, but not both together.
The use of ‘radical’, however, is more complex. Several conservatives point to
the etymological meaning of the word as getting to the roots of the matter, and
reaching a full and complete understanding of it. True conservatives, they argue,
should readily wish to do this. So for a conservative to be radical, it would mean
that they are merely gaining a full understanding and getting right to the heart
of the matter. But this argument is problematic on two grounds. First, it seems
to me that there is some rather dubious manoeuvring going on here. The word
‘radical’ may have the etymological meaning referred to above, but its common
usage, and what I would suggest makes it so appealing, particularly to younger
conservatives, is this sense of radical as meaning extreme, unconventional and
outside the mainstream. So relying on the ancient meaning of the word while
using it to distinguish oneself from mainstream conservatism is, it seems to me,
somewhat disingenuous.
Second, and more fundamentally, we might follow Roger Scruton (2001) who
argues that conservatives are concerned with the surface of things and do not
subscribe to hidden meanings. Conservatives do not wish to explore the underneath
of things, as they know they can only do so by destroying what they seek to
examine. We can get to the roots only by pulling up the plant and examining them,
perhaps by cutting them up and then discarding them once we have discovered
what we wish to know about them. But why would conservatives wish to destroy
that which they are party to? They wish to be rooted, to stay in place and not to be
dug up. We should therefore be distinctly non-radical: to be anything else would
mean rejecting and destroying the traditions we seek to preserve.
Indeed much of this book can be seen as an argument against radicalism and
the desire for significant change. I wish to propose that stability and complacency
should be honoured much more than they are. I do not reject the notion of change,
only the idea of change as an end in itself. Change should be remedial rather than
transformational. Of course it is a rather more complex issue than this simple
statement implies, but I hope that the arguments presented in the book will show
it to be a tenable one.
xii The Antimodern Condition
One further reason for writing this book, as may now be apparent, is my
dissatisfaction with the labels of ‘left’ and ‘right’ to denote basic divisions in
politics. In this I am not being particularly original, and there are many who see
the old divisions as no longer relevant. There are more important divisions that
matter to people, based on issues such as equality, freedom and authority that
cut across the traditional notions of left and right. But, for me, the key division
now relates to the notion of progress. Both the left and right have united around
the desire to progress and create a better society. The Conservatives do not stress
the need to conserve but rather wish to portray themselves as progressives, and
recently they have indulged in a bidding war with the Labour party to assert their
progressive credentials. So, as I argue here and elsewhere (King, 2011, 2012),
the key divide is no longer along the tribal divisions of left and right but between
those who promote progress and those who wish to assert the primacy of tradition.
In other words, the basic distinction is between the modern and the antimodern.
The financial crisis that hit the world in 2008, and which at the time of writing is
nowhere near its resolution, has shown the problems that arise from the modernist
mentality, with its emphasis on material progress, untrammelled aspiration and the
inability to accept our place in the world. We are no longer prepared to be mere
bit players, but wish to see ourselves as being of greater significance. We aspire to
acquire what we currently do not have and judge ourselves and others according
to these aspirations. As a result we look into the far distance rather than focusing
on what is close to us.
But in the aftermath of the financial crisis there has been no real attempt to
question this modern attitude. There have been those who have questioned the
whole nature of capitalism, but their solutions tend to be utopian and equally
materialistic. For the mainstream, however, the response has been that the cure
involves another dose of the virus. Government policies aim at encouraging
economic growth and politicians talk of the need to encourage aspiration. The aim
is still to change the world in the belief that things can only get better as a result. We
are still encouraged to cast aside what we have now – to see it as insufficient – in
favour of some opportunity we are told is just over the horizon. But in aspiring to
reach the mythical shining city on a hill, all we do is foul the nest.
This book is my attempt to present a different vision, and it is indeed a
committed one. The book is intended to present a philosophical argument rather
than to be a comprehensive review of the literature on antimodernism. I am aware
that I am unlikely to convince many of those who adhere to the idea of the left
of my good intentions. Likewise, I shall no doubt have alienated many on those
Preface xiii
who see themselves as being on the right, who might have wished for stronger
meat. This is doubtless a problem, but then the stakes here, as with all academic
endeavour, are rather low and so I suppose I will survive. What I would hope for,
however, is that this work will be taken as a sincere effort to put across a particular
point of view and that those who read it will only come to a conclusion on it at the
end rather than at the start.
Acknowledgements
I have a long running joke with a colleague of mine that I will never write another
book. Since we started this banter I must have written at least another six. Book
writing is one of the things I enjoy doing and, as much as I sometimes feel
exhausted and disillusioned by the writing, I keep on doing it. What makes it
enjoyable is seeing what started out as only a few tentative ideas sketched out in a
notebook turn into a completed book. But at the end of the process I always think
that this might be the last one and that I should instead do something useful.
Researching and writing is a rather isolated and isolating activity. It is
something that I do on my own. But in order to make this possible, I have to rely
on those around me to give me the space to work. Much of the burden falls on my
wife B. After 21 years B is now used to how I work and I bless her for her patience
and love. Our daughters, Helen and Rachel, are a great source of pride to us both:
I thank them for putting up with my solitary habits and I apologise for trying too
hard – again – to interest them in my latest project. If there is a next one, I promise
not to talk about it … too much.
I am all too aware that this is a rather eccentric project and so I am very grateful
to Rob Sorsby and his colleagues at Ashgate for taking the book on and making the
process such a straightforward one. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers
for their constructive and helpful comments. Not for the first time my sister-in-law,
Sheila, has proofread the final manuscript, and I can only thank her for saving me
again from many grievous errors. Any errors that remain are of course entirely due
to my stubbornness or stupidity.
I am fortunate to work with the most supportive group of colleagues who
provide the very best sort of working environment: support when it is needed
and space to get on with my projects the rest of the time. So many thanks to Tim
Brown, Helen Hay, Ros Lishman, Mike Oxley and Jo Richardson.
And so, until the next time, let me say, with all the feeling I can muster: ‘I shall
never write another book!’
Peter King
Introduction
One of the defining characteristics of modernity is the belief that we are subjects
distinct from the world. We are, according to Descartes, thinking subjects who are
able to look outwards onto the world. We exist, as it were, distinct from the external
world beyond us. This separation is crucial to the understanding of modernity and
its motive force, namely, the idea of progress. We exist to further ourselves, to
progress and to achieve (substantially, if not entirely) human perfection. Human
beings are perfectible – that is why we believe in the material basis of science
– and they can attain this through their use of reason to exploit the objective world.
The world has particular attributes that we can recognise, catalogue and then
exploit for our own purposes. The world is made up of discrete pieces that we see
as objects available for our pleasure.
But this separation of ourselves from the world is a dangerous one. It forces
us to look forwards, and only forwards. We are focused on progress towards
perfectibility and so we need not look backwards. We take for granted what we
have now and use it to reach ever further into the future in the belief that this will
make us happier, healthier or better. But the act of looking only forwards means
that we deliberately limit our vision. There are things that we refuse to look at and
which in time we may forget about entirely. Those things behind us do not matter,
and the fact that we cannot see them proves this. So we insist on progressing
forwards towards what we are sure is a better place.
But this reaching out, this stretching to attain what we feel is only just out of
reach, may lead us to overbalance. We are so concerned with what is ahead of us
that we forget what we are balancing on. We take for granted all those traditions,
institutions, relationships that we need in order to stand where we are and reach
out. We are so focused on the future, we forget how much we depend on the past.
We ignore the fact that we are only standing where we are now because of what
has gone before us and what has been expended in maintaining us.
The desire for progress is exploitative. It uses up what is around us and, in
taking for granted our past, it uses up our inheritance without regard for the
2 The Antimodern Condition
consequences. But as we are convinced we are always just on the threshold of

some better future, why worry about the current cost? Whatever we sacrifice now
can be more than made up when we have achieved our potential. After all, we must
speculate to accumulate.
The problem, and hence the danger, is that progress, and the transgression it
necessitates, is not temporary. It is not a short transition from one stable point
to another. Instead progress becomes an end in itself. The whole purpose of
modernity is the journey: progress is in reality nothing but flux and transgression.
There is no agreed end point, no accepted notion of what human perfection would
be, but merely a desire to be better, to reach the next step. But this step is merely
the next point of departure.
What progress ignores is the importance of harmony, whether it be within
ourselves, between others and ourselves, or between the world and ourselves.
Progress stresses the separation, the apartness, of ourselves from the world.
However, to recognise the need for harmony challenges the rush for progress. It
makes us question the cost of our action, that what we do may pull and tear at our
connections with others in the world. It forces us to look at what we are using,
what we are stepping on and exploiting to achieve our pleasures.
Harmony is a concern for balance. It is where we recognise that we cannot
move without it affecting everyone and everything else. We are connected and
our actions are consequential. What we do impinges on others and so we should
factor this into our calculations. Indeed it makes us question the very nature of our
calculations: what are we seeking; why do we do it; what might we achieve, and
what happens if we do not achieve it? If we move so does everything else and do
we know what the consequences will be?
Of course, we may weigh up these consequences and conclude that the benefits
outweigh the costs. We may consider that a change in the balance is a price worth
paying for what we hope to achieve through progress. But this would not be to
understand properly what we mean by harmony. It is not merely a matter of being
aware and so perhaps taking notice of the consequences of our actions. Harmony
is when we question the actual process of calculation. What matters is the balance
itself, not what this means to any one part of the whole. If we are part of the world
then what matters is the world as a whole, not just ourselves. In other words,
harmony is an end in itself.
Harmony and balance imply that we stay in place. We do not seek to move,
to progress or improve on what we now inhabit. Harmony is a concern for
permanence, for settlement, for what we might call dwelling.
Introduction 3
To concentrate on dwelling allows us to focus our actions in their fullness, on

their complete effect and on all the levels implicated in that activity, from the very
idea of human settlement to our most private inner thoughts. Dwelling focuses
on our relations at all levels, with loved ones, friends, neighbours, strangers and
with the world itself. Martin Heidegger (1993) equates dwelling with building: for
humans to dwell means they build structures for themselves. In turn, he defines
building, through its etymological roots in Old English and German, as related to
the verb ‘to remain’ or ‘to stay in place’ (p. 146). Dwelling, as building, is thus more
than just mere shelter; it is a reference to the settlement by human beings on the
earth. Indeed, for Heidegger, dwelling is humanity’s ‘being on the earth’ (p. 147).
To dwell is to mark ourselves with meaning. According to
Christian Norberg-Schulz (1985), dwelling achieves three things. First, it makes
practical the exchange of products, ideas and feelings, whereby we experience
life as a multitude of possibilities. Second, dwelling shows we may accept a set of
common values. It is through this that we can share and care. We dwell because
we are capable of establishing and operating conventions which moderate and
regulate our relations with others. We can live in proximity with others and in
so doing thrive. Third, to dwell is to be ourselves, where we can enjoy that small
chosen space of our own: dwelling means we can withdraw as well as share. It
means we can care for those we love and, in so doing, exclude all others. We can
circumscribe what is meaningful for us within an enclosed space.
This suggests that dwelling is not just a concern for architecture or the
built environment. Heidegger sees dwelling as human settlement in general:
it is the house, the village, the town, the city and the nation, but it is also
humanity taking root in the soil and recognising our part in the world. We are
rooted, embedded and not able to fly free of the world, seeking our interests
independent of it.
Dwelling, then, is a matter of balance. It is the activity that creates, maintains and
sustains the permanent human presence in the world. Dwelling is about the material
and non-material relations that create the capacity for human continuity. Dwelling
deals with the human presence in all its complexity, in that it allows us to talk about
the universal and the subjectively private: human settlement and my home.
To dwell means to live on the earth. It is to be in place. We are at home in the
world. We have a place of rest and a place that makes us. Dwelling is what we do:
it is human settlement in the most general sense. To dwell is to be present in the
world. We show our presence through the domestication and taming of nature, and
so become tamed ourselves. We dwell through the creation of permanent social
and political structures and through the private space we make for ourselves.
When we dwell, we mark our place in the world and so are marked ourselves as
worldly creatures.
Dwelling is to be in the world and to be at one with the world. Dwelling
manifests our need for permanence, stability and stasis, and our wish for things
to remain as they are. It is what we do as part of the world and, in doing so, we
become at one with the world. It is where ordinary quotidian habits link to mystery,
where we join with something much larger than ourselves. Dwelling shows us that
the ordinary and the mysterious are not distinct but are one and the same: the
mundane habits of our existence are where we make use of the world and inhabit
it with meaning. In doing so, we become a mere part of the world. The world does
not require us to understand it, but to become it.
Dwelling is our inhabitation of the world in all its fullness. We are all one
with the world; we are of the world and it is in us and, as such, we act the world
out and the world acts through us. How we act is determined by the world, and
we are not distinct from it. There is no sense of humanity being against or beside
the world. Humanity is manifested as a mere part of the world. This does not,
however, suggest any simple determinism or that there is any prefigured pattern.
We have no necessary or preordained role in the world. Instead our actions carry
with them a responsibility of involvement: how we act, the decisions we take
individually and collectively, can affect how the world is. Without doubt, we can
change the world and make it into what it currently is not. But it still remains the
world, and we are still part of it. The world is changed and we are changed with
it. And with change we take a risk in our lack of understanding. We risk throwing
things out of balance.
We can see the world either as a process of change or as a point of acceptance:
it can be transgression or accommodation, movement or stasis, harmony or
displacement. To create change is to displace, to move ourselves away from where
we currently are. It is where we reject the idea of keeping ourselves in place and
seek to keep moving. We forget we dwell and seek instead to transgress. We see
a virtue in movement and in change and we repudiate the static point. Yet when
we keep moving, when we stay in transit, we can never be sure of where we are.
But to dwell is to recognise that we are points of being rather than processes
of movement. We are fixed points of the world, existing within a web of relations.
We are rooted and connected through well-worn ruts of meaning. And we seek to
maintain these and persist with them and we do so precisely because they keep
us fixed. We do not wish to be pulled away from our place, to be uprooted or to
Introduction 5
be taken out of those ruts we know so well. If we are uprooted, then we become
displaced and disoriented and our connections with others become strained. So we
do not seek to break new ground, but instead we relish the anchor, the foundation,
the solidity of the known; we know our place, and the meanings that this exerts on
us are palpable and help to ground us.
This notion of being in place is threatened by modernity and the chase for
progress. As we have seen, progress insists that we set ourselves apart from
the world. We seek to improve our condition and we refuse to accept what we
have now as anything other than transient and contingent. Nothing is therefore
beyond transgression. We believe in our own perfectibility and so cannot accept
the boundaries of our current life. We always want better and believe that its
achievement is possible. The desire – the need – for transgression inherent in
modernity precludes stability. There is no one place, but a series of temporary
holdouts from where we plan our next move. What we lose in this desire for
transgression is our connection with the world. We forget the closeness, the
openness we have to the world and which it has for us. Our loss is one of balance,
the ability to remain level with what is around us.
We should see transgression as the very opposite of stability. Modernity
relishes flux and this serves to separate us from the world. We can agree here
with René Guénon (2001a, 2001b, 2001c), who argues that modernity has
severed our traditional connection with the world. Hence instead of progress
and evolution – both peculiar to Western modernity – he sees our predicament
as one of inversion, of a decline from a once-enlightened golden age. The idea
of progress is, for Guénon, a Western aberration: the idea that we can improve,
that we are capable of moving towards a better society planned and made by
ourselves, is an absurdity. We are by no means capable of perfectibility, and our
attempts to achieve it are both naïve and hubristic.
Progress and modernity depend on the assumption that we can control the
world, and that it is there for us. It is where we assert a distinction between the
world and humanity, and that the world is a resource for us to exploit and use as
we see fit. But this is disharmonious and destructive: it means we cannot maintain
the world as it is, or as it wishes itself to be. Instead we try to make the world in
our own image. We see it as ours and as a distinct object separate from ourselves.
We feel we own it and so can use it as a resource. To be striving for change is
therefore to see ourselves outside or beyond the world. We tear ourselves from the
world. We uproot ourselves and breach our connection with the world in the belief
that we can remake ourselves and the world as we please and relocate ourselves
to a place of our own choosing. In doing so, we become footloose and forgetful,
and lose what makes us what we are. We empty ourselves out; we become hollow
shells. We become separated, displaced from, and anonymous to, the world. We
become subjects claiming the capability of transformation within an imagining of
transgression. And in our imagining, in our dreams of a perfect world, we become
forgetful of dwelling. In our forgetfulness we seek to mould the world in the image
of our dreams of perfection. And it appears that there is little that can stop us. In
the moment that is now, the time we have before us, we come to see that we can
remake the world.
But this leads only to destruction. We cannot sustain what we make and remake,
and this is because we are not capable of understanding our actions. So what we
create is disharmony. We cannot remould the world and leave it harmonious. We
can only remould the world on the presumption that we are distinct from it, that we
are separated from it, that we are above and beyond the world and that it is ours to
control and to make and remake according to our own will.
But we are not distinct from the world: we are mere parts of it. So when we
tinker with the world, we tinker with ourselves. We think we are in control of
what we are doing and that we will stay in control. But, in reality, we cannot be
trusted and we are not in any way acting responsibly. We have power but lack
authority. We cannot justify what we do in any way that goes beyond ourselves,
and this is because we do not properly know either the world or ourselves. The
only justification we can find is that we have at this moment the power to hand,
that in this moment we see ourselves as capable of acting. But what we seek to
alter is not ours to change. Others have bequeathed to us what we now have, and
we are beholden to those who will follow us to hold what we have in trust for
them. But also we cannot alter the world without altering ourselves. And as we are
a mere part of the world, and not beyond the world, we cannot properly control
that change. If we alter what we are dependent upon, then we change ourselves,
and we will do so in a manner that we cannot properly predict.
What allows us to maintain our hubris is the fact that, being part of the world,
we are well supported. We can live well because of the fecundity, diversity and
resilience of what is around us. But this is not infinite, and we cannot ignore our
connections indefinitely. We cannot act without the world responding in some
way. And the world will respond because of its implacability. It cannot respect our
separateness. The world does not know us as things distinct from itself. And so it is
impartial in its responsiveness. The world’s response to our actions depends on its
nature as world and not on the power we lay claim to hold, no matter how great that
Introduction 7
power might appear to be to us. The world has its limits and once they are reached,
the world responds implacably. This means the response will be unyielding and
beyond our capabilities to control or understand it. We need the world to sustain
us and once we separate ourselves from it, we lose the connection that absorbs us.
Standing out alone makes us vulnerable to the world in its implacability.
We can start to remedy this when we remember how to dwell as part of the
world. We then recall that we are located beings. We realise we are not beyond
the world, able to look at it in its totality. We cannot transcend it. Or rather we
accept that we cannot do this without losing our hold on the world, without losing
our connection to it as world-giving and without the loss of much of ourselves as
part of the world. What we must do therefore is to regain the sense of ourselves
as being within the world. We must re-accommodate ourselves as part of the
world and accept our part in its wholeness. We must reject transgression and the
desire for separation from the world. If our attempts at distinction and control
are destructive – of the world and ourselves – then we must accept our limits.
However, in doing so, we can recognise that our limits are the world itself, and so
it is our very inhabitation that provides us with these limits.
II
Anyone arguing against progress has an immediate problem: one of credibility.

How can anyone possibly be against progress? Surely everyone wants things to
get better, whether it be technology, medicine or the way we treat each other.
Does anyone really want to return to the days before fast travel, shatterproof glass,
Wi-Fi, central heating and antibiotics?
So what I need to do first is to state what I am arguing against and what I
am not. The antimodernism that I discuss in this essay is not against advances in
technology, at least not all of them. The target is instead the ideal of the modern.
This ideal itself is not time-bound – modernity has existed for over 300 years – and
consists of a rather particular way of seeing the world. In short, modernity is the
belief in progress.
Progress is that product of Enlightenment thought that sees the pursuit of
human perfectibility as the supreme end of politics. It consists of the argument that
we can, and therefore should, create a better society. It is therefore incumbent upon
us to transform how we currently live with the aim of achieving this betterment.
The modern belief in progress is where we place tomorrow over today and so put
at risk the interests – and sometimes the lives – of current generations for those yet
to come. It encourages us to look forwards and to ignore the past, where, because
it is old-fashioned, nothing can be learned.
So when I refer to the modern, it relates to something quite particular. We
are to view it in political, cultural and perhaps religious terms. Antimodernism
is the opposite of this concept of progress. It does not exclude breakthroughs in
technology or medicine that make our lives safer and more comfortable.
But antimodernism is not just opposition to the modern. It also involves a
set of beliefs that, to a greater or lesser extent (there being many forms of
antimodernism), favours tradition, the established ways of acting, the sacred
and spiritual, and accepting the world as we think it always has been and should
remain. These views, unlike the belief in progress, are anti-utopian, being based
on common sense, and, like modernity, they are not particularly time-bound. It is
therefore entirely consistent to be antimodern in the here and now, and accordingly,
to accept much of what makes up modern life, whether it be travel or technology.
What matters is our attitude towards the world around us and so how we make use
of this technology. Antimodernists criticise modernity for seeing progress as an
end in itself rather than seeing change as a means of maintaining and correcting an
existing and living tradition.
We can of course try to live without the technologies and conveniences of the
present, and it may well be possible to do so. However, we will have to admit
that we will also be relying on a certain level of technology, even if it just is the
bicycle and the public phone box. At one time, these technologies were themselves
innovative. Using technology on a day-to-day basis is contemporary rather than
modern as I have described it. It is commonplace and ordinary and it does not
mean we subscribe to a belief in progress and human perfectibility. We are using
them because we can; they are convenient and practical and part of normal lives,
and through use they become banal and commonplace themselves. The technology
bends to our lives: we use our mobiles to communicate inconsequentially with
others; we may be using technology more often and in a different manner form
that of 30 years ago, but it is still a common human practice which we have bent
the technology towards. For an antimodernist it is not necessarily the use of the
technology that is at issue, but the claims made on its behalf, that technology is
transformative and life changing.
At the risk of caricature, we can say that modernists are those who think that
they can understand the world and so they act accordingly. They plan and change
and call it progress, and ignore the fact that their plans fail or do not work as they
Introduction 9
predicted. Postmodernists are those who believe it does not matter that they do not
understand the world and think this makes them very clever as it seems to allow
them to do whatever they like, particularly to ignore those things they make but
which do not work. Antimodernists are those who know how much they do not
understand, and this frightens them into inaction. If one has no idea how a thing
works, then it might be best to leave it alone.
Antimodernism assumes that modernism still exists and that it has not been
superseded by anything else. Modernism retains the dominant intellectual position,
and so being against it is informative. So long as we can understand the idea of
the modern, we can begin to appreciate antimodern sentiment as well. Modernity
places no emphasis on how we got into a particular situation and what might be
lost by vacating it. It rather tends only to focus on change and so looks forward
into the future. It is much more concerned with the hypothetical than with the
present and actual.
Being antimodern does not mean all change will be opposed. Indeed some
antimodernists would positively relish change if only it were of the correct variety.
But there is always the recognition that change brings with it unpredictability
and unintended consequences. If there were not unwanted results why would we
want past changes to be reversed? But this also means that any future change is
fraught with danger. Antimodernists will therefore tend to support change only
where it seeks to repair existing institutions, or it replaces the new with a former
arrangement, if and where it is possible. But in either case change will only be
supported if it does no harm and if this can be clearly demonstrated. Moreover,
any change would have to be consistent with the traditions the values of which it
is seeking to augment. Hence it is important to recognise that change is acceptable
only when it corrects, not when it seeks to improve. As Edmund Burke states:
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries

are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government,
nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born,
altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon
our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert
loquacity. (Burke, 1999, p. 181, original emphasis)
Burke here encapsulates much of the antimodern condition. Much of what we

need to make our lives sustainable already exists and has been known since long
before we ever set foot in the world. We cannot readily improve upon it and so we
should not seek to try.
This presupposes a particular attitude whereby we accept what we are, who
we are and where we are. It is this acceptance that makes our life tenable and
recognisable to us and to others. The life we lead comes about simply because of
how we are and where we are. Were we not able to accept much of what is around
us, and take it for granted, we simply could not live. Through acceptance we can
get on with our lives without having fundamentally to question every step we take
or move we make. Our lives are given meaning through regularity and habit. We
need not engage with the ‘why’ of things because what we need is already there for
us. We have a structure and a foundation. We are anchored and need not remake
our own base every day. For us, the world is not contingent or in constant flux.
However, an important element within modernity is transgression: the idea
that we should not accept things as they are and actively seek to amend them.
We should constantly strive to change our world, to improve it and to aspire after
something better. But the problem with this view of change is that we come to
see it as end in itself and do not necessarily strive for anything meaningful or
worthwhile. Instead we are continually striving for its own sake. Once we have
one thing, we move on to the next, such that aspiring after things becomes the
means whereby we judge the success of our lives. We are continually moving and
do not stop, perhaps in fear of the question we would have to face if we did.
Of course, I have chosen the title The Antimodern Condition knowingly, and
in the light of certain books and debates in the recent history of social thought.
However, this book is not intended as a critique of Jean-Francois Lyotard and his
famous book The Postmodern Condition (1984). My challenge is only an indirect
one, in that I offer an alternative critique of modernity based on different premises.
Clearly I disagree profoundly with his description of the world as postmodern, but
I do not choose to engage with his ideas in any great detail here. Instead, I wish
to build up my own description of the antimodern condition, free from any direct
associations with the postmodern critics of modernity and the subsequent debate.
The result of this attempt is a series of relatively freestanding chapters, which
look at aspects of the modern and antimodern. Each chapter tends to rely on its
own source material and there is apparently only minimal connection between
them. The purpose of this is to create a series of vignettes that build up a picture of
the antimodern condition as diverse and distinctive. But it is also one that does not
rely particularly on recent right wing or traditionalist thought, and this is precisely
because I see much of it as tainted by modernity. I have therefore tended to avoid
Introduction 11
those writers who see antimodernism as a radical, or even a revolutionary, position.

So this book often takes as its sources cultural rather than overtly political material.
But this, it seems to me, is absolutely necessary if we are to build up an accurate
picture of the antimodern condition, which does not depend on a particular political
dispensation or policy framework. The antimodern condition is a disposition, or
way of looking at the world, rather than a political programme. It manifests itself
in many ways, but most of these are outside the political realm. As I will show, this
is because the antimodern condition is concerned with maintaining what is close
to us and with a critique of progress, of the idea that we should look far away for
our answers.
While there are positive aspects to the antimodern, it is essentially a form of
critique and this means that it operates outside the dominant realm. Many of the
sources I have used in this book are the works of outsiders, who have taken on the
role of cultural critics, and through this, either directly in the case of René Guénon,
or more allusively as with E. M. Cioran, have developed a distinctive vision that
can be called antimodern.
It is only at the end of the book that I seek to pull the various strands together.
My conclusion is that we should seek to preserve what we have, to favour the
familiar and things that are close. We should be careful of what we strive for, and
what we might have to forego in the striving. We should recognise that our life
is about balance, about maintaining the appropriate relations with others in the
world. It suggests that we focus on sustaining ourselves as we now are rather than
striving for something that we may never attain; that we stop to live now, and
with what we have, instead of always trying to secure what we see as ‘better’. We
should seek to keep things close to us rather than continually searching for more
and so neglecting what is close. The antimodern condition is therefore not radical
or transformative, and that is exactly what is intended. It is the very opposite of
transgression.
This book, despite the comments above, remains a political project, in that
it challenges the basic presumptions of modern politics. In some ways it might
be seen as a form of anti-politics in that the main arguments do not often rely on
conventional political analysis. But the outcome of the discussion has a decidedly
political import.
Modernists believe in change for a purpose. They wish to create a better world.
Postmodernists believe in change for its own sake. They seek to transgress and do
so because they can. Antimodernists believe in keeping things pretty much as they
are. They wish to hold on to what they have and to treasure it. Modernists have
a vision of the future. Postmodernists focus on the emergent mess they call the
present. Antimodernists dwell on the past. These are easy caricatures and we can,
of course, criticise them. Modernists will argue that there is much merit in progress
and that many of the changes they have sponsored are for the better, although they
may insist on they themselves being the judges. Postmodernists will argue that the
romanticism of the past and the utopianism of the future are untenable and that the
present – what is here now … and now – is all we have. Antimodernists may claim
that we can merely speculate about the future but only truly learn from the past,
ideally, it has to be said, with themselves as the judges.
Modernists and postmodernists have no shortage of apologists, and the libraries
and bookshops are full of arguments in favour of both. We know what modernists
and postmodernists think (and this is why I see no need to go over this ground
again). But can we be so sure about antimodernists? They tend to have less of a
voice. They are crowded out and ignored by the mainstream, which now appears
to be a battle between those who argue that change is necessary and those who
believe that change is inevitable. The antimodernist view is seldom heard, and this
book is an attempt to try to remedy this. It does not present a complete picture,
and it may be that other antimodernists will disagree with the approach taken and
wish to emphasise other elements. However, my hope it that it will start a debate
and lead to some recognition that sometimes staying put is a better option than
moving forward.
Chapter 1
Backwards
We make sense of our lives by looking backwards. Any society is grounded in

its past. It is based on the specific nature of its constituent parts, and these are the
institutions and the people who have built them and who must now maintain them.
But to acknowledge this basic fact involves an acceptance of the limits imposed
on us by the specific institutions that our ancestors have built. We are not innovators
but rather the recipients and trustees of a tradition. We depend on institutions and
habits that have evolved over time through the actions of others living together.
As Edmund Burke (1999) has shown, our nature makes our morality and our
principles of government are complete as they are. We can use them and hand
them on, but we do not expect, and do not need, to improve on them.
This view is grounded in the knowledge that we have no other life than that we
are currently living. The promise of a better life merely distracts us from our daily
existence and asks us to sacrifice actually doing what we can for the sake of a hope
or dream, which may in any case only be available to others (if it is available to
anyone at all). What is more, we can know this as soon as we start to read the past.
If we accept this view, we will naturally turn away from ideas of and hopes
for the future. Instead we can look around us and relish what we have. Instead of
illusive ideas of a better future, we merely have an attitude or disposition, and one
that is conservative instead of progressive. What this disposition is composed of
has been summed up Michael Oakeshott:
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer

the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited
to the unbound, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the
convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships
and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of the more profitable attachments;
to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to
enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty and
promise. (1991, pp. 408–9)
Oakeshott favours what is already known. We will prefer the familiar to the
unknown, what is already around us as opposed to what we cannot yet understand.
The sense that we get from reading Oakeshott is not one of anxiety and fear.
We do not favour the familiar and the known because we are frightened, rather we
do so out of experience and a sure understanding of what we already have. There
is indeed a confidence in the prescriptions of the conservative disposition that does
not brook doubt. And this confidence comes out of an appreciation of how we are
not as others might wish us to be.
But this view, however, is not a particularly popular one, be it in the academy
or in politics and this includes within the major conservative parties of the Western
world. Instead of a belief in the efficacy of the past, politicians of all shades look
to the future and promise change. The present, they suggest, is not good enough
and so we must move forward to a better tomorrow when injustice, inequality and
unhappiness will be eradicated, as they surely can be (even though their ancestors
have had little success in their attempts). This call for progress may be based on a
genuine view that the present conditions are unacceptable, or it may be because it
is felt that our true nature is not to accept what we have but to strive for something
better. It may be argued that it is in our nature to progress and seek to eradicate
injustice (Archer, 2000). We are, it may be said, programmed for change. The
human condition is to progress and to evolve always into something better.
But this is a very modern idea that can be dated to no further back than the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Guénon, 2001e). Indeed, it may be said that
this view of the human condition actually encapsulates the very essence of the
word ‘modern’. According to René Guénon, most societies throughout history
would not have recognised this desire for progress as either natural or desirable.
The traditional view of time was not linear but circular, based on the seasons and
the movement of the heavens. There was no reason to assume that things would
necessarily change for the better. Life was based on what was known and what was
established. Innovation was aberration and to be opposed rather than accepted. It
is this basic nature of traditional societies that the great conservative thinkers, such
as Burke and Oakeshott, have noted and dwelt upon. It is this which I have chosen
to refer to as the antimodern condition.
Backwards 15
II
Antimodernism is a product of the Enlightenment, or rather what rose to oppose

it. This movement, made up of French conservatives and reactionaries and
German romantics, has become known as the Counter-Enlightenment, a term
coined by Isaiah Berlin (1997). The Counter-Enlightenment came to oppose
the notions of progress, rationalism and sceptical enquiry that have formed
the basis for much of modern thought. As Anthony O’Hear (1999) has stated,
the differences between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment are
readily apparent:
If the Enlightenment stressed reason, the Counter-Enlightenment stressed

feeling. If the Enlightenment stressed science and modern civilisation, the
Counter-Enlightenment stressed nature and the primitive life. It looked
within, into our hearts, where the Enlightenment sought objectivity. Further,
the Counter-Enlightenment emphasised the diversity of human society, and
questioned the very notion of progress that saw modern societies as better than
ancient of primitive ones.
Human nature was not universal, it was particular and historical: different
peoples had their own cultures and norms, and they could not be compared or
judged prejudicially – from the point of one society or the other. And where the
Enlightenment sought to found social institutions on human reason and human
choices, the Counter-Enlightenment looked for religious foundations for society
and morality. Finally, where the Enlightenment would submit all old beliefs
to the test by contemporary scientific reason, the Counter-Enlightenment saw
virtue in habits and beliefs just because they were old, because they had stood
the test of time, because they embodied ancient and not necessarily immediately
discernible wisdom. (p. 27)
We might summarise this distinction by stating that the Enlightenment sought

to question all traditions, habits and institutions on the basis of a universal idea
of reason, whereas the Counter-Enlightenment sought solace in the particular
and the established and did so precisely because they were so specific and
entrenched. Instead of looking where we want, or ought, to be, the Counter-
Enlightenment sought to stress the utility of being just where we already are.
It saw individuals and communities as being grounded or rooted in their place

and that this differentiated them.
Berlin (1997) argues that ‘one of the most interesting and influential’ (p. 20)
thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment was Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre provided
a critique of the modern, including the preference for the scientific method and
rationalism over intuition and providence (de Maistre, 1996, 1998). Instead of the
optimistic Enlightenment view of humanity as rational and capable of good, he put
forward an understanding of humanity as violent and aggressive. We do not come
together naturally to co-operate and live peacefully, but rather we need discipline
and order in our lives directed from above. Instead of maximising autonomy and
freedom, the state needs to be the focus of authority and this authority should be
absolute. There can be no compromise with democracy or the will of the people.
This is a betrayal of the providential role of the state as the absolute determinant
of the social order. In his St Petersburg Dialogues (1993) de Maistre considers
the role of the executioner as the symbol of this absolute sense of order. The
executioner may be a figure who is regarded with disgust and repugnance, but
according to de Maistre, it is he who ensures the order of the whole.
De Maistre (1850) was a critic of what he saw as the burgeoning atheism of
the post-Enlightenment period, with its denigration of the place of the Church and
Papal authority. He sought to justify placing spiritual authority over the temporal.
He argued that all societies have a religious basis to them that pre-dates any form
of temporal governance. All this can be seen as a justification for sustaining and,
where necessary, restoring what is long established and traditional rather than
concentrating on what is new.
This, we might suggest, is a deeply pessimistic view of humanity, but it is not
an unconfident one. This is because human societies have already discovered the
means to control their aggressive urges, and this is through the establishment of a
proper social order. The problem of the Enlightenment, according to de Maistre,
was that it sought to destroy this order and to replace it with a naïve and fallacious
view of human nature. It is not that we lack the remedies, it is that, according to de
Maistre, we choose to ignore them, preferring to new and fashionable ideas.
As a thinker, de Maistre is important because he reminds us of the limitations
of what it is to be human. He places us within a scheme that is greater than that
of our own making and understanding, and so calls into question the human quest
for perfection. De Maistre is sceptical of science and of what we now refer to as
positivism and argues instead for a return to a more providential view of human
Backwards 17
social order (de Maistre, 1993, 1998). There is very little we can do on our own in
a complex world not of our own making. As Jean Starobinski says of de Maistre:
The rejection of revolutionary innovations was accompanied by a political

fatalism that defined itself more specifically as a providentialist quietism. The
will of God (‘the great geometer’) would be accomplished sooner or later despite
human designs. One needed only to be patient. In the meantime, the Jacobins
and the republican armies would do their work – territorial conquests – that
would eventually profit the future monarchy. The designs of Providence would
be realized with the inevitability of the laws of nature. (2003, p. 327)
De Maistre had a confidence in the failure of progress and felt we could just wait
for the inevitable.
De Maistre demonstrates a particular cast of mind, a mentality that is properly
reactionary. He is one of the best examples of a brilliant and cultured mind
focused on maintaining a particular traditional sense of the world. De Maistre’s
virtue is in his attempt to show the unvarnished reality of human nature, and so to
provide a necessary counterweight to Enlightenment optimism and the idea that
progress was, and is, inevitable. He shows us that progress can be destructive,
and this is because of how human beings really are rather than what the French
philosophes assumed them to be. Human beings, according to de Maistre, need
order, discipline, constraint and punishment. He reminds us that wars happen and
that some people relish them and are proficient in prosecuting them, and that the
rest of us rely on these people for our protection. We are glad when such people
are there for us, even though we might be concerned about what they actually do
in our name, and we might not wish to delve too deeply into the full nature of their
actions. In short, de Maistre shows that human beings are by no means perfect, nor
are they perfectible, and this is not just some temporary aberration.
As Berlin (1997) argues, this can be taken as an extreme position, and we need
not accept all of it. De Maistre was writing from within the specific milieu of the
Enlightenment itself. He was not looking back with the benefit of 200 years of
history, but from a position that saw the Enlightenment as incomplete, and thus
an active threat to existing institutions. In our day we face different threats and
have different concerns. The battles of de Maistre’s time have been won and lost,
and we are faced with that legacy. But we can still learn much from the attitude to
change taken by de Maistre, from how he sought to contest the heady optimism of
an Enlightenment that would soon lead to terror and violence.
As Alain de Benoist (1993) has stated, we cannot know how figures such as
de Maistre would respond in today’s situation. But their perspective, de Benoist
speculates, remains relevant in a world in which the consequences of progress
are now all too apparent. We are now all too aware of the consequences and
complexities created by our desire for progress. We know what destructive impact
scientific and technological progress has had on the environment and the inner
health of many people, and we have begun to question this. This is not to suggest
that we should agree with all that de Maistre says – we cannot judge him entirely
without regard for the sensibilities of our age – but it does imply that he may still
have much to tell us, and that we have much to learn, should we be willing. If he
were alive today, we might expect he would quite naturally moderate his views
towards the specific milieu in which he was born (although many would still find
him extreme). Yes, he would be a reactionary, but he would, we might suggest, fit
into the world in which he found himself. What he would provide us with, as he
indeed does from across the distance of years, is a template by which we might
judge our place in the world. It provides us with a set of presumptions by which
we can locate ourselves. De Maistre allows us to place ourselves with regard to
the modern.
So what are these presumptions? I wish to state that there are four key elements
to antimodernism as it can be configured in the conditions that prevail in a world
that is becoming sceptical of the effects of progress. Each of these elements builds
on the previous ones to create an interlocking picture of antimodernism as a
defence mechanism against progress.
The first is that instead of being concerned with what is new and different, we
wish to focus on the accepted and habitual ways of acting and doing. We have a
rhythm to our lives and we take this as normal and proper. This has developed
over time and we have adopted it without any conscious act of will. It is not based
on anything rational and is not amenable to rational assessment and critique. It is
something we have inherited and accept because of who, what and where we are.
Accordingly, we will resent being pushed out of this rhythm and resist those who
seek to force us to accept what is new and different.
Second, these accepted and habitual ways of behaving lead us to believe that
there is a common culture of which we are a part. This connects us with others
around us and gives us a sense that we share something greater than ourselves.
There are particular ways of behaving and responding that mean we belong to
this greater whole. This common culture pre-dates us and will reach beyond us,
and this makes us a part of something with a continuity and a significance that
Backwards 19
transcends our everyday concerns. This sense of allegiance, however, does not
negate differences between us, nor does it mean that we will not sometimes feel
separated or even alienated from others. However, the common culture ties us to
others and determines our response to them and, in turn, how we expect them to
act with regard to us. This sense of commonality may remain implicit and appear
merely as part of the accepted and habitual. However, it may become explicit if it
is challenged or threatened, either from within or without.
The third element takes the idea a stage further in that it stresses that the culture
remains common only by making its transmission from one generation to the next
a priority. One of the principal elements of a common culture is the regard for its
own continuance. This is the only means by which the accepted forms of acting
may be preserved and our lives continue on unchallenged. The key institutions
of that culture need therefore to be geared towards its reproduction through the
transmission of knowledge and understanding.
This takes us to the fourth and final element, in that we see the principal aim of
government as being the protection of those institutions that transmit the common
culture. The aim of government should be to maintain those institutions, traditions
and practices that allow the common culture to thrive.
A key part of antimodernism is that it sees no real need to justify itself. The
elements upon which it is based are merely accepted as self-evident: we feel
them to be right and seek no further justification. Furthermore, we might resent it
were our assumptions to be challenged and questioned. The experience of these
institutions and habits and their continued existence is all that we need in order to
believe in them. For us, they are tried and trusted forms that have worked and that
continue to do so. The things that antimodernists lean on are not then speculative
or utopian, but are rather the real traditions, structures and institutions that have
created us as we are, and whose decline, forced by the cause of progress, has
caused major social and political problems.
As its origins in the Counter-Enlightenment suggest, it is in the nature of
antimodernism to present its arguments negatively. It is against something – those
ideas that threaten the accepted and traditional common culture – and so it will tend
to present a defensive argument. And of course what is argued against is modernity.
It is only when modernity threatens tradition that antimodernism becomes active
rather than passive. Richard Lebrun, in his biography of de Maistre, suggests that:
Much of the strength of a traditional society lies in the fact that its structure and
values are unquestioned – indeed unquestionable. It is only when the status quo
has been attacked and disrupted that the need to defend it becomes imperative.
The conservative theorist almost inevitably finds himself in a defensive posture,
involved in a debate on the relative merits of the old order versus the new,
impelled to base his arguments on the assumptions of the innovators. And by
engaging in the argument at all, he easily becomes suspect to members of the
traditional elite who have always simply assumed the rightness of existing
structures and values and their own privileged place in the traditional order.
(Lebrun, 1988, p. 124)
As de Maistre himself states in Against Rousseau (1996, p. 86): ‘If a belief is not
attacked, it would be useless to declare it’. Our beliefs only need expression when
they are challenged, otherwise we could carry on without their articulation. Our
beliefs become precious when they are attacked and we can no longer take them
for granted. We are immersed in our world and do not recognise the importance
of our way of life until it is under threat. Once our views are attacked, we start
to see them as distinct entities, as elements separate from us, but which are very
important, even crucial, to us. They stop being merely part of us, or things just
as they are, and instead become a distinct set of principles that need articulation
in order to mount a defence. They have a meaning and a history. The principles
become part of public discourse instead of being merely inchoate. We have to
recognise what we have and what it means to us, and the threat of their loss makes
this all too clear to us.
III
If antimodernism is a reaction, we need to consider, albeit briefly, what causes

it. Following O’Hear’s distinction between the Enlightenment and Counter-
Enlightenment we can suggest that the modern is the belief in progress and that
solutions to social and political problems are possible through the application of
reason. It therefore places a premium on the idea of change and sees the need for
flux and constant adaptation. This presupposes a desire always to look forwards
and to reject the past, the idea of tradition and established forms of behaviour
in favour of an objective and supposedly scientific approach to problem-solving.
This carries with it the positivistic notion that problems can be correctly identified
and solutions posited and implemented by experts who have the requisite expertise
and knowledge, something that is denied to the ordinary person. The modernist
Backwards 21
believes that there is a body of knowledge that can be applied, by experts, to social
and political problems.
So the idea of the modern means more than simply the world as it is now.
Instead it is concerned with a particular rational approach to the world, that sees
human perfectibility as a necessary aim and that this can be achieved through the
application of scientific or technical means. It involves the placing of innovation
and newness over tradition. Indeed, as with the Enlightenment, it will tend to
involve the general denigration of traditional practices and reject the past as a
guide for future action. It will tend to neglect our ancestors and the old-established
ways of doing things in favour of innovation and originality.
This suggests that modernity will be self-regarding and will refuse to look at
aspects of the world that do not fit into its template of progress and innovation. It
believes in its own superiority and that it need not look outside its own methods
of analysis to discover facts about the world. This flows from the conceit that we
moderns are inevitably superior to our ancestors and that our duty is to ensure that
this ascendency continues: we are more advanced than those who preceded us and
we understand more about the world than they did. We therefore do not need to
respect the past and its tradition, whether it is in politics, our history, high culture
or architecture. Scruton (1994) talks of the disrespect and incivility of modern
architecture and design, where buildings do not complement their surroundings,
or seek to fit in. Instead they seek to make their own statement, to stress their
individuality divorced from any context, their immediate environment and the
traditions of the past.
Of course the primary example of this is the comment of Le Corbusier (1927)
that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (p. 95). Le Corbusier felt that the machinic
metaphor was generally applicable to modernity, and thus his model of housing
could, and should, apply in all cases. Modern human beings therefore had no
other context than their modernity. Their needs could now be expressed free of
geography, history, caste or creed. All these factors were deemed irrelevant in
the face of modernity; Le Corbusier took it for granted that ‘All men have the
same needs’ (1927, p. 135). Accordingly, the aim of Le Corbusier, as with other
modernists, was to remove any specificity from their architecture, to decouple it
from its local environment. We can see this when we look at Le Corbusier’s Une
Petite Maison, a house he designed for his mother on the shores of Lake Geneva
in 1923–1924 (Baltanás, 2005). As José Baltanás states, this house ‘asserted the
autonomy of modern architecture over the impositions of the site’ (2005, p. 37).
What this means is that Le Corbusier made no attempt, and saw no need, to blend
his architecture in with the local surroundings. It was rather the case that the site
should be made to fit the design.
This decontextualisation is further emphasised by the fact that the house was
later covered in corrugated aluminium cladding ‘of the type used in the construction
of the fuselage of planes. It hardly need be pointed out that this modification was
entirely to the liking of Le Corbusier, as it emphasised the metaphor of the house
as a machine’ (Baltanás, 2005, p. 38). Consequently, the house, which sits right
on the shore of Lake Geneva and offers truly stunning views across the lake, has
the external appearance of a flat-roofed barn or cow shed, its incongruity matched
only by its ugliness. As a piece of architecture it can only be appreciated by
viewing it without any context and without questioning how it fits into the site.
This, however, is the primary aim of modernism: to reduce everything to its own
concerns; to place the abstract over the particular.
As we have suggested, modernism as an intellectual movement developed
from post-Reformation and Enlightenment concerns to develop objective science
and a universal morality and laws. These were seen to be autonomous systems
of thought in the sense of operating according to their own inner logic rather
than being circumscribed by external pressures (Harvey, 1989). It was thus the
belief that one could construct a better world and improve humanity through the
active pursuit of rationality, objectivity and a common morality. There is within
this an explicit belief in progress towards a particular purpose, the pursuit of
which was necessarily universal as it was deemed to lead to an improvement in
the human condition. According to David Harvey, the Enlightenment project,
‘took it as axiomatic that there was only one possible answer to any question’
(1989, p.27). It involved ‘the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, and rational
planning of ideal social orders under standardised conditions of knowledge and
production’ (1989, p.35). The means of achieving this was through the adoption of
a rational scientific epistemic towards the so-called ‘human sciences’ of sociology,
politics, economics, etc. These emerging disciplines have become the vehicles for
describing progress towards ‘ideal social orders’.
Jean Francois Lyotard, in his manifesto The Postmodern Condition (1984),
describes the term ‘modern’ in terms of the development of the human sciences,
which he refers to as ‘metadiscourses’. He defines a metadiscourse as a ‘discourse
of legitimation with respect to its own status’ (1984, pxxiii). It is a justificatory
explanation of its own purpose as discourse. It seeks to provide a justification
for the imposition of a particular means to discover truth. According to Lyotard,
such metadiscourses make ‘an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the
Backwards 23
dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational

or working subject, or the creation of wealth’ (1984, pxxiii). These metanarratives
are attempts to develop a total vision of human progress. They are the means
of achieving an ‘ideal social order’, whether it be based on Hegel’s idealism,
Marxism or the liberal ideal of capitalism. According to Lyotard, these are all
examples of grand purposive visions of human progress towards utopia.
Lyotard sees modernism as creating bodies of scientific knowledge aimed at a
total description of human beings and identifying a means of achieving the ideal,
be it the end of history or the classless society. The expert, with the requisite
knowledge gleaned from the properly developed human sciences is capable of
plotting a path leading towards the achievement of important social goals.
Therefore a key part of modernism, particularly as it is applied to the social
and political context, is that it is possible to place the human sciences on the same
level as the natural sciences. This has become known as positivism, which can
be defined as the acceptance by social scientists of the empiricist account of the
natural sciences. This is the belief that knowledge can only be gained through
the systematic observation of the world. Science is based on direct observation
of phenomena rather than through reasoning or independent conjecture. As Ted
Benton and Iain Craib (2001) have suggested, it is the belief that ‘Science is
valued as the highest or even the only genuine form of knowledge’ and that the
‘scientific method can and should be extended to the study of human mental and
social life, to establish these disciplines as social sciences’ (p. 23) They go on to
state that ‘Once reliable social scientific knowledge has been established, it will be
possible to apply it to control, or regulate the behaviour of individuals or groups
in society’ (p. 23). The answers to problems can be identified and resolved by the
application of this knowledge on the part of experts in the same manner as in the
natural sciences and engineering. Technical solutions to problems are eminently
possible and so they should be sought. This approach places great authority in
the hands of scientists. They are portrayed as the experts able to dispense their
knowledge to solve social problems.
The Enlightenment project had a further aim, which was the secularisation
of society. It sought to place rational thought and science over and above
religious explanations of the human situation. Yet as both John Gray (1993)
and Anthony O’Hear (1999) have pointed out, the very fact that Enlightenment
thinkers sought to create ideal social orders reintroduced a version of Christian
eschatology to modern thought. Gray’s critique of progress is particularly relevant
to our discussion here, showing the self-contradictory nature of modern calls for
progress. He argues that ‘the idea of progress is particularly pernicious when it acts
to suppress awareness of mystery and tragedy in human life’ (1993, p. 138). He
feels that peddling the idea that life will be better in the future, and that sacrifices
and suffering by people today are therefore worthwhile, ‘corrupts our perception
of human life, in which the fate of each individual is – for him or her – an
ultimate fact, which no improvement in the life of the species can alter or redeem’
(p. 139). We are, so to speak, equal under God, and so no one life can be used for
the purpose of furthering the project of another.
Gray also suggests that ‘the project of universal improvement’ (p. 139) can
be questioned in that ‘the eradication of one evil typically spawns others, and
many goods are dependent for their existence on evils’ (p. 139). In other words,
we cannot know what effect our efforts at improvement might have and whether
they will actually make our lives better or worse. Gray also agrees with Counter-
Enlightenment thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who questioned the
commensurability of human goods and so argued it is incoherent to talk about
making progress. In other words, if there is no such thing as a universal good
that applies to all cultures, how can we state that progress is being, or even can
be, made?
Lastly, Gray sees progress as a ‘surrogate for spiritual meaning’ (p. 139),
which encourages us to see our lives ‘not under the aspect of eternity, but as
moments in a universal process of betterment’ (p. 139). Instead of living for now
and accepting our place in the world and our life as it is, we are always looking
forward to what we might become. Gray argues that ‘the idea of progress
reinforces the restless discontent that is one of the diseases of modernity’
(p. 139). We are never content with our lot, but instead are constantly striving for
that which is always just beyond us.
So we can suggest that the utopian element within calls for progress owed
much to the religious impulse, or what Eric Voegelin (1987) has termed the
immanentisation of the eschaton. According to Voegelin (1987, 1997), utopian
ideals integrated many of the millennial tendencies of pre-Renaissance Christianity
into social and political thought. It effectively secularised the idea that the Second
Coming was imminent and so sacrifices were worth the making. So modernism
does not do away with the religious impulse, but it merely perverts it, turning it
into a political goal.
Backwards 25
IV
But does antimodernism offer anything positive beyond the critique of progress?
The first point to make is that there is not merely one form of antimodernism.
Arthur Versluis (2006) points to several different forms of antimodernism, which
can be sorted into two broad categories. The first he calls ‘soft antimodernism’
and this would include those who seek to moderate modernity and bolster
tradition. He includes writers such as Hillaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton,
who opposed modernity on religious grounds, and T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats,
who offered a critique of the cultural fragmentation brought in by modernity.
This form of soft antimodernism operates from within the modern. It does not
seek to destroy the modern world or to exile itself from it. Instead it bases its
antimodernism on critique and dialogue and a call to defend what is under threat.
It is largely defensive, focusing on the flaws of modernity and on emphasising
those elements of the culture that should be nurtured, promoted and protected
Soft antimodernism works through critique and by emulation of what is the best
within a still-existing culture.
The other category is what Versluis identifies as ‘hard antimodernism’,
which consists of the violent opposition towards modern technological societies
including attempts to disrupt or destroy it. These antimodernists seek to create
fundamental change: to put things back to where they were, or where the
proponents imagine things were. This category, he suggests, can include certain
types of Islamic extremism and other forms of direct action seeking to bring
modernism down from within or without. He also includes in this category forms
of extreme environmentalism, primitivists who call for a return to a pre-modern
and non-industrial form of social organisation, such as John Zerzan (2005, 2008),
and those who seek to perpetrate acts of isolated violence against modernity, for
example, the so called Unabomber in the USA. Versluis argues that the advent
of environmental concerns, such as pollution and global warming, have given an
impetus to certain forms of antimodernism and lent it a more extremist tinge.
This hard form of antimodernism is not the form I wish to develop here. Instead
I wish to follow the form of antimodernism developed from within modernism,
which seeks to question and to spread doubt and suspicion about those ideas and
concepts at the core of modernity. The aim is not to destroy, but then nor is it to
create. It is merely to preserve the familiar and to extol the virtues of what we
have built together. This being so, there are only certain means we can properly
use, namely, those that fit within the traditions and institutions we are seeking to
preserve. To be antimodern is to focus on the past, on heritage, on harmony and on

our connection with traditions. It is to pay due regard to civility, and to the need
to complement what already exists rather than to replace it. Antimodernism gives
regard to what has gone before and to give it a higher place than the instant, and
quite probably temporary, fashions of the present. To be antimodern is to be, as a
matter of practice, continually learning from the past. We see that the past is the best
possible teacher: it is better than any abstract theory and is to be preferred to the
utopianism of the moderns. This of course means that we should not rush to change
things too quickly. It is therefore profoundly anti-radical. It eschews sudden change
and is against the use of violent and destabilising methods to promote its ends.
It seeks only to protect and not to destroy.
The antimodern condition shows a concern for permanence and for settlement.
The antimodern condition is about holding on to things and then keeping them
close. We have no grand vision. Instead it is where we are in place and feel able to
stay put. We are centred, stable; there are parts that do not, and should not, move.
These are things that we can hold on to. We are of the world around us and not
apart from it. The world accepts us and we accept it. We are there and with those
who we care for, and so we are equally theirs. We do not have to know anything:
rather we feel, we believe, we can have faith. We consider that this is simply the
way things are. We may admit that they need not be so – things could always be
otherwise – but they are not. This is now how they are and we are content with
that. To change what is here now would be to create instability and start off a chain
of uncontrollable and unpredictable events.
Antimodernism, I wish to suggest, is a concern for home, for being rooted,
located and in place. It is where our primary concern is for those who are close
to us and for keeping them close. It is the recognition that we desire to retain
proximity and stability over and above all other things. This is without doubt an
inward-looking idea. But in looking inwards, it does not ignore the world as it is.
The antimodern condition does not reject the world. It is rather a way of seeing, of
looking at the world through the window of our own home. It framed by what we
see as familiar, by what is known and what we feel close to.
Depending on our attitude, we can see this as either a comforting or a cautious
attitude. Some might portray it as frightened view of the world, which turns away
from progress and the challenges of the new. But this, I feel, would be a superficial
view. For most of us, most of the time, this idea of stability and balance is a
positive and attractive one. It affirms the idea that home is a place of security and
comfort that provides us with a sound foundation for playing our part in the world.
Backwards 27
Most favourably, it does not necessarily involve the rejection of anything. Instead
it involves a particular presumption about what the world might offer us and why
this would matter to us. So the antimodern condition is not just a way of seeing,
but also a way of keeping. It is a means of experiencing the world of which we
are a part. It is where we are focused on ourselves and our own, rather than on the
concerns and abstract ideals of elites who might seek to determine how we should
live. It is both cautious and comfortable: indeed the comfort is maintained by the
caution. Anything else would be too much of a risk to our home and to the things
we love. But this is all within the recognition that we are embedded in the world.
We are, so to speak, the world and not separated from it. We know we cannot be
sustained without our roots.
Chapter 2
Forgetting
We can describe the modern world as being dependent upon a culture of forgetting.
We no longer look backwards, but are constantly being urged to look forwards.
We place progress and change at the very centre of our lives and see any attempts
to hold us back as regressive and reactionary. Innovation is to be striven for and
we reject continuity as a sign of failure. Both private companies and public bodies
will have their mission statements and their strategic plans and we as individuals
are encouraged to aspire and to look to what we can make of ourselves. These
always involve casting ourselves forwards into the future where we can – no,
we will – be better than we are now. We are on an upward path and with hard
work, and perhaps a bit of (always deserved) luck, we can achieve great things. Of
course these great things may always be just, but not quite, about to happen, but
nonetheless we are sure they are about to arrive.
There is, though, a danger in defining ourselves by what we will be: this
is that we see ourselves currently as nothing or, at best, constantly diminished
in comparison to what we consider we ought to be. We are works in progress,
capable and deserving of better and so we should strive harder to fulfil our always
legitimate aspirations. But currently we are somehow diminished; we are not
complete or finished.
What cannot, or rather must not, define us is the past. We are not interested
in what made us up to this point, because this point is itself merely contingent,
a transitory place from which we intend to leap to a better and more eagerly
anticipated place. Why dwell on what has left us incomplete and which cannot
offer us any promise? The past is not full of any promise for us. It is merely full
of the dead – dead hopes, dead promises and dead people. There is nothing for us
there. We feel we can forget the past because it offers us nothing. Of course there
may be some recidivists who insist that we can learn from the past, but we can
ignore them as we go forwards into the future: why should we worry about them?
We know where we are going and there is no need to look back.
The veneration of the past seems to be irrational. We cannot change things

and so it is better we forget about them. It is meaningless to bother with dead
things that we cannot alter. Lingering on the past merely prevents us from doing
things now. Those who dwell on the past are perceived as wistful, relying on the
romantic and the mystical. But, we consider ourselves rational and clear thinkers.
We eschew the mystical and the esoteric and see it as somewhat primitive and
perhaps even embarrassing, to be reserved for cranks and those on the fringes.
Instead we are firmly at the centre of things, agreeing with others on our rationality
and progressive thinking. We are concerned with the future, with making things
better and meeting our aspirations.
Accordingly, when someone of the stature of the Prince of Wales or even Pope
Benedict XVI try to warn us of the rush for progress, we sneer and question what
they know about the modern world (which, we assume, is the only one on offer)?
We laugh at their quaintly outdated ideas and wonder how such views, and the
institutions that these figures represent, can still exist in the face of modern science:
don’t they know how ridiculous they sound? In any age there is a particular way of
seeing the world and of framing our understanding of it, and figures like the Prince
of Wales and Pope Benedict XVI seem to be well outside the frame. They appear
to be looking at the world in a radically different, even perverse, manner from us.
In fact, we feel they are so out of touch with the modern world that we need not
take them seriously.
But in dismissing them so readily, we eschew the need for ourselves to
question, or even to notice, the particular frame that composes our view. We do
not see that this is merely one way of seeing, which might be the result not of any
greater understanding, but of a forgetting. We might, despite our modern conceits,
actually understand rather less about the world than these deluded (if supremely
well-connected) cranks. So, what if we are the ones who have blinkers on, forcing
us to look forwards and cutting us off from a full view of the world as it really is?
A focus on the past, and what made us what we are, might actually help us.
Knowing what others have done, and not done, might serve as a model for us. We
might learn some humility and gain a proper sense of ourselves in the world. We
become somewhat less pleased with our supposed rationality and start to question
what it is to be modern and a progressive. What the cranks might tell us, if we were
to listen, is that there are things much greater than our petty current concerns and,
moreover, these concerns, just like we ourselves, are merely the consequences
of what came before us. We have no special place, we are party to no special
Forgetting 31
knowledge and this means that we cannot make the world or ourselves simply as
we please.
In short, there is some justification for being antimodern, for being against
progress and seeking to bind to the past and to those traditional ways of acting and
believing that have formed us. We ought to listen to those who criticise modernity
and wish to locate us somewhere else, to put us back in our place and cure us of
our forgetfulness. I wish to dwell on one particular critic of modernity, the French
perennialist René Guénon (1886–1951). He is a thinker who does see the world
in a completely different manner from that of the modernists and progressives.
Instead of placing progress and individual aspiration at the centre of the world,
Guénon argues for the recognition of tradition and for the anonymous acceptance
of the world as it is. He argues against innovation and for our acquiescence to
things as they actually are. In other words, he wishes us to start remembering what
it is that we have forgotten.
II
While Guénon was French, he spent the final 20 years of his life in Egypt living
the life of a traditional Muslim (Chacornac, 2001). After dabbling in occult and
masonic organisations in early twentieth-century Paris, Guénon, in a series of
books from 1921 onwards, developed a form of perennialism that focuses on the
idea of tradition. His philosophy is therefore one of looking backwards and of
remembering what the modern world has lost.
Guénon is perhaps a rather obscure figure, particularly outside France. However,
there are a number of reasons for choosing to consider him as an important thinker
of the antimodern. First, he presents what might well be the most complete
challenge to modernity, by any thinker before or since. In his long writing career
he was able to develop a very through critique of modernity. His criticism was of
Western civilisation itself, not merely particular political structures. So the second
area of importance for us is that he was not merely concerned with politics, but
with the spiritual aspects of civilisation. In this regard, perhaps more than in any
other critique of modernity, he is able to present his criticism as a condition, not
just as an ideological assault. He attempts a complete and consistent vision of the
antimodern.
But Guénon also shows the degree of ambivalence that must exist between
modernity and antimodernity. His work would not be possible without modernity
and so, in a very real sense, depends upon it. Antimodernism is a reaction against
the modern and springs out of it. This might be seen as a negative point against
Guénon, and indeed we shall see that Guénon’s influence is greatest where
modernity has taken root. However, it also suggests to us that it is possible to
be a contemporary antimodernist: while antimodernism is clearly concerned with
the past, it is most of all an engagement with the present. Guénon shows us that
antimodernism is not time-bound or limited to a particular milieu.
What makes Guénon so fascinating, but also so disconcerting for those
educated to think along the narrow lines of modern rationality, is that he completely
reverses our presumptions about intellectual progress. Instead of seeing our ideas
as an improvement, believing that we know more than the ancients, he argues that
we have only a shallow and very much degraded understanding of the world. We
have become separated from what is truly important in our lives, having placed
material progress before any spiritual and traditional modes of living. For Guénon,
our modern intellectual condition is a mere shadow of what we were once capable
of. He goes beyond the reductive nature of modern scientism and offers us a much
broader vision of reality that includes the spiritual and non-material. Accordingly,
his work is concerned with informing us of what we once were and could be
again if we could find the traditional ways that we have lost. Thus, Guénon
rejects the claims of modern science and the idea that we have progressed as a
civilisation. Instead this supposed building of a modern civilisation is an inversion,
a destruction of a much greater entity. The Renaissance was not a rebirth, but in
reality the last act of forgetting, the final rejection of the world as it should be
properly understood.
Accordingly, an important idea in Guénon’s work is that of inversion. This is
the very opposite of progress and, according to Sedgwick (2004), it is ‘seen as
an all-pervasive characteristic of modernity. While all that matters is in fact in
decline, people foolishly suppose that they see progress’ (pp. 24–5).
Guénon, consistent with perennialist thinkers since at least Marsilio Ficino
in the fifteenth century, suggests that there was a primal truth that underpinned,
and so was able to unite, all the major belief systems of the world. This truth
necessarily pre-dates all these systems of belief and was presented to humanity
by some transcendent means, fully formed in the first age of the world. Since then
civilisation has been in an ever-quickening decline. Human history can therefore
be seen as the forgetting and ultimate rejection of the perennial philosophy and the
belief that humanity can be self-contained and determined by its own development,
free from any metaphysical or supra-human manifestation.
Forgetting 33
This is undoubtedly a distinctive and different view and one that is not often
welcome in the modern lecture theatre or classroom. It is a view of the world
that can be readily dismissed as the work of a crank or a deluded fool who sees
things in the past that are not really there. But, Guénon certainly should not be
so readily dismissed. While he certainly does not lack anything in the way of
self-certainty, and so felt no need to compromise his views by taking any account
of prevailing academic conventions or indeed any possibility of doubt, Guénon
offers a picture of the world and its becoming that is so radically different, yet
which is so self-contained with all the various elements connected, that we cannot
fail to be challenged. And in doing so we begin to question many of the things that
we take for granted. To follow Guénon we will have to put our modern prejudices
aside and try, if only for as long as we are reading him, to accept the world as he
sees it. This does not mean we suspend our critical faculties, but rather we are open
to a different way of seeing the world, one that does not depend on all those ideas
that we take for granted. In doing so, we might see that Guénon’s articulation of
tradition can help us explain where we are and where we should be going.
III
But what is tradition? What is this thing that Guénon sets such store by? Clearly
we can see tradition as a series of cultural practices that relate to a particular
community or nation. In this sense, we should properly talk of traditions, of any
number of specific cultural practises. We can therefore suggest that nations and
cultures have their traditions, but we also use the term to talk about particular
styles in art and literature, and as a general reference to long-established ways of
doing things. It is not unusual then to hear of particular family traditions, which
may be something as banal as always eating the same thing for breakfast on
Christmas day.
But this is not how Guénon wishes to consider tradition. The immediate
difference is that instead of seeing the term in the plural – of there being many
traditions – he talks of tradition in the singular. For Guénon, there is not a
multiplicity of traditions, and nor does tradition merely refer to cultural practices.
Instead tradition is a set of universal principles that underpin all modern religions
and systems of thought. Tradition is the primordial basis of all ancient thought.
Mark Sedgwick (2004), in his study on Guénon and traditionalism, shows that
the Latin root of ‘tradition’ is tradere, which means to hand over or hand down.
It can be taken to mean a ‘belief and practice transmitted (especially orally) from
generation to generation’ (p. 21). This suggests that tradition is itself a practice – a
handing down – rather than any specific content. This definition could allow for a
tradition of anything and would do as a definition of the cultural practices we have
mentioned above. Yet, for Guénon, it is precisely what is being handed down that
matters. It is tradition because it is elemental – or ‘principial’ as he often refers
to it as – and necessary for any society: it is not merely wisdom but the wisdom.
Several of Guénon’s followers have sought to clarify precisely what he means
by tradition. For example, Robin Waterfield (2002) states that:
Tradition was essentially the body of knowledge and self-understanding which

is common to all men in all ages and nationalities. Its expression and clarification
forms the basis of all traditional wisdom and its application the basis of all
traditional societies. (p. 80)
Tradition is a body of knowledge that is potentially open to all: it forms the basis of
all wisdom and is used to form the foundation of all properly constituted societies.
It is through tradition that we can come to understand the world that we are in and
find our place in it. As Luc Benoist (2003) states:
It is concerned with origins: tradition is the handing on of a complex of

established means for facilitating our understanding of the immanent principles
of universal order, since it has not been granted mankind to understand unaided
the meaning of his existence. (p. 14)
The tradition is therefore the manual for our life in the world: it is how we
understand our place and our purpose. Accordingly, Benoist suggests that tradition
is akin to the ‘spiritual relationship between a master and pupil, that it to say of a
formative influence analogous to that of spiritual vocation or inspiration, as actual
for the spirit as heredity is for the body’ (p. 14). He goes on:
What we are concerned with here is an inner knowledge, coexistent with life
itself; a coexistent reality, but at the same time an awareness of a superior
consciousness, recognised as such, and at this level inseparable from the person
it has brought to birth and for whom it constitutes the raison d’être.
Forgetting 35
From this point of view the person is completely what he transmits, he only is
in what he transmits, and in the degree to which he does transmit. Independence
and individuality are thus seen to be relative realities only, which bear witness
to our progressive separation and continuous falling away from the possession
of an all-embracing original wisdom, a wisdom that is quite compatible with an
archaic way of life. (p. 14)
As we move away from this wisdom, the more obscure it becomes, and so we find it
harder to understand the true nature of ancient civilisations. We become incapable
of seeing the essential unity, the basic inclusiveness, of tradition. So tradition is a
particular type of wisdom, which forms the basis of all human understanding. The
modern need for individual expression and aspiration is part of this falling away
from tradition as we become ever more ignorant of the underpinning principles
that give meaning to our place in the world.
The problem for Guénon, as implied by Benoist, is that an understanding of
tradition has been almost completely lost in the West, and part of the problem is
that the word ‘tradition’ is now used so inappropriately. As he states, ‘the very idea
of tradition has been destroyed to such an extent that those who aspire to recover
it no longer know which way to turn, and are only too ready to accept all the false
ideas presented to them in its place and under its name’ (Guénon, 2001e, p. 209).
The corruption of the word is such that it is not uncommon to talk of traditions
within modernity, whether it be traditions within art, politics or science. But, as we
have suggested, he is particularly critical of the use of ‘tradition’ to mean custom
or usage, which he sees as reducing the term to the ‘lower human level’ (p. 211).
For Guénon, ‘there is nothing and can be nothing truly traditional that does not
contain some element of a supra-human order’ (p. 211). The key problem with
modernity, therefore, is ‘the well-defined desire to reduce everything to the human
level and to retain nothing that surpasses it’ (p. 211). We should therefore resist
coupling the word tradition with terms such as ‘political’, ‘humanistic’, ‘national’
or ‘scientific’, as these all involve ‘an explicit denial of the supra-human’ (p. 212).
For Guénon the problem is materialism, what he refers to as the solidification of
the world (Guénon, 2001e).
As tradition is spiritual in nature its main threat is from materialism, and it
is this that Guénon takes as defining of modernity. He argues that ‘materialism
has insinuated itself into the general mentality’ (2001e, p. 194) to become a form
of common sense that needs no ‘theoretical formulation’ (p. 194) but which is
now a sort of instinct. This is only reinforced by the ‘industrial applications of
mechanised science’ (p. 194): ‘Man “mechanised” everything and ended at last
by mechanising himself, falling little by little into the condition of numerical
units, parodying unity, yet lost in the uniformity and indistinction of the masses’
(p. 194). A fellow traditionalist and collaborator of Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy
(1989), has argued that industrialisation and civilisation are incompatible. If
civilisation depends on tradition, and therefore religion, it must be opposed to those
forces which seek to perpetuate industrialisation and globalisation. Civilisations,
for traditionalists like Guénon and Coomaraswamy, are local and particular, even
as they are based on the idea of a single primordial tradition. This view has three
important implications.
First, traditionalism is against the idea of globalisation and economic growth
and development. It seeks to maintain traditional forms and to re-establish old
forms of living and acting. It can be quite properly seen as both anti-Western
and anti-capitalist. As we shall, Guénon’s target is what he terms ‘the West’ and
this can be seen as the societies of Europe and the USA. However, the West
is also an ideal, namely, that of industrialisation, mechanisation and scientific
rationalism, which is destructive of tradition. The West need not be simply taken
as a geographical concept.
This rhetoric against the West might be seen to connect Guénon to contemporary
critics of globalisation and the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon capitalist model
of economic development. However, while there are apparent links in terms of
rhetoric and purpose, there are essential differences. Guénon’s aim in promoting
tradition is in no way political – this would be a thoroughly modernist approach
– but is rather spiritual. Guénon, as we have seen from the definitions of tradition
given by Waterfield and Benoist above, is principally concerned with helping us to
understand the underpinning spiritual basis of civilisation and how this is destroyed
by notions of progress and rationality. Traditionalists do not wish to create a new
world order, but rather to return the world to its traditional understanding of the
supra-human basis of civilisation. It therefore, in reality, has little in common with
the globalisation and anti-imperialist movements even if it might share some of
the overt aims.
The second important issue with regard to tradition’s opposition to economic
progress is that it eschews any sense of homogeneity. Most assuredly traditionalism
rests on a primordial tradition, but Guénon is not seeking to create some world
civilisation in which all peoples follow the same direction. Rather he argues that
all traditional societies have a shared root, and therefore all longstanding systems
of thought, such as the great religions and the Chinese, Greek and Egyptian
Forgetting 37
philosophical systems, have this in common. However, they have developed

separately in a legitimate manner representative of how these civilisations have
adapted the traditional wisdom to their own situations. Guénon’s sense of tradition
is primordial, not universal. Therefore it is most definitely not legitimate to impose
one particular system, be it Islam or Christianity, on all the others, and nor is the
aim of Guénon to advocate a synthesis of all these religions. Traditionalists see all
the great religions as possible paths to the same end. Some of these religions may
be older than others, and some, like Christianity, might have drifted further away
from the shared root, but the task is to restore the essential elements within these
religions rather than promote one over the others or to synthesise them.
What has been lost in Christianity and in other religions is the esoteric element.
Modern religions, and Guénon sees the Protestant churches as the worst example,
have almost entirely lost their esoteric core with its emphasis on initiation into a
secret wisdom gained by following a required path and by accepting the disciplines
of the esoteric order. Guénon argues that all religions have an exoteric or public
side, which is what the majority see and can share. This is the performative element
within religion, with its public display of faith. Yet underpinning this exoteric part
is the hidden esoteric element whereby the secret wisdom is maintained and passed
on. This element is only available to an elite minority and can only be understood
through an appreciation of the symbols that are hidden within exoteric religion.
For Guénon, modern Christianity is now merely a public display, with the esoteric
elements almost completely lost, having been subverted by the Renaissance and
the Reformation with its opening up of Christian doctrine and the democratisation
of faith. The role of the traditionalist is therefore to demonstrate the importance of
the esoteric and, in doing so, show the connected nature of all the various ancient
systems of thought. Guénon sees that the key aim of traditionalists is to build up a
new elite capable of properly interpreting and maintaining that tradition.
The third issue, which follows from the first two, is that traditionalism is
explicitly antimodern in its outlook. It rejects the idea of material progress and
seeks to restore what has been lost in these ancient systems of thought. As Guénon
states, ‘Anyone who considers himself a “traditionalist” must normally declare
himself “anti-modern”’ (Guénon, 2001e, p. 213). It is simply not possible to
accept much of how the world currently is and nor where it is seeking to go.
Traditionalists cannot accept material progress as worthwhile in itself, nor can
they accept the subverting of traditional ways of life in the name of this supposed
progress. Guénon simply cannot conceive of traditionalism reconciling itself with
the modern world.
IV
As should now be clear, the target for much of Guénon’s critique is what he terms
‘the West’, as manifested by its materialism, its industrial model, and its political
and economic dominance. As we have suggested, while this points to a specific
part of the world, Guénon’s real focus is on the modernist mentality that has arisen
in Europe and which now pervades much of the world. The West’s problem is that
it has lost its connection to tradition. In its place has been put progress and the
belief that the West is superior because of its apparent material wealth. Accordingly,
he argues in his first book, An Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines
(Guénon, 2001a):
Europeans, since the days when they began to believe in ‘progress’ and in
‘evolution’, that is to say since a little more than a century ago [he wrote this is
1921], profess to see a sign of inferiority in this absence of change, whereas, for
our part, we look upon it as a balanced condition which Western civilisation has
failed to achieve. Moreover, this stability shows itself in small things as well as
in great; a striking example of this is to be found in the fact that ‘fashion’, with
its continual changes, is only to be met with in the West. In short, Westerners,
and especially modern Westerners, appear to be endowed with changeable and
inconstant natures, hankering after movement and excitement, whereas the
Eastern nature shows quite the opposite characteristics. (p. 13)
Westerners cannot settle on anything, but are rather constantly seeking the new
and different. Fashion dominates their thinking and so nothing is permanent, all
is change. What we might suggest is that only the speed of this continual flux has
increased since Guénon’s day.
Guénon may see tradition as a singular entity, but, as we have seen, he does
not assume that this means that there is only one form of civilisation, or that any
particular one should be imposed upon others. Like the antimodernists of the
Counter-Enlightenment, Guénon, in what is perhaps his most influential work,
East and West (2001b), argues that there are many forms of civilisation, not just
one, as Europeans believe. Indeed the West is the odd one out in comparison to all
other civilisations:
The civilization of the modern West appears in history as a veritable anomaly:

among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilisation
Forgetting 39
is the only one that has developed along purely material lines, and this
monstrous development, whose beginnings coincide with the Renaissance, has
been accompanied, as indeed it was fated to be, by a corresponding intellectual
regress. (p. 11)
The idea of progress is not typical. Societies, for Guénon, do not evolve, but instead
they remain true to tradition and allow individuals to pursue their true natures.
However, those in the West have regressed so far from tradition that they are
no longer capable of even seeing what they have lost:
This regress has reached such a point that the Westerners of today no longer
know what pure intellect is; in fact they do not even suspect that anything of
the kind can exist; hence their disdain, not only for Eastern civilsation, but
also for the Middle Ages of Europe, whose spirit escapes them scarcely less
completely. (p. 11)
What Guénon finds most preposterous is that the West sees itself as the main,
or indeed the only, form of civilisation. He is contemptuous of the idea that it
alone deserves to be called a civilisation because it can boast of progress. Instead
he sees progress, and the growth of materialism that became linked to it in the
second half of the eighteenth century, as a ‘substitute for thought’ (p. 16) and
useful only for ‘imposing upon a mob’ (p. 16). Progress has no substance, and is
based on no higher principle than itself, even though progress is seen as indefinite.
Progress is an end in itself that becomes necessary in order to hide its very lack of
substance, For Guénon, ‘What Westerners call progress is for nothing but change
and instability’ (p. 26).
Mark Sedgwick (2004) argues that in East and West Guénon ‘systematically
attacks the illusion of materialism and the “superstitions” of progress, reason,
change (as desirable in itself), and sentimental moralizing (an Anglo-Saxon
specialty)’ (p. 25). However, Sedgwick believes that ‘What Guénon opposes is not
the West but the modern world’ (p. 25). The East is identified with tradition and the
West with modernity, and so, according to Sedgwick (2004), ‘the title “East and
West” could equally have been “Traditional and Modern”’ (p. 25).
Accordingly, he does not wish to see the West superseded by the East, but
instead seeks to restore an appropriate Western civilisation: he wishes for a
change in the mentality of the West. As a civilisation it has lost its real, namely,
spiritual foundations, and what is needed is an intellectual elite to help build these
foundations anew. Indeed, as Robin Waterfield (2002) states, ‘East and West are
not primarily geographical or even cultural distinctions; they are symbols of two
different fundamental attitudes towards reality’ (p. 69). The West, ‘especially
during the last 600 years … has concentrated the greater part of its attention on the
phenomenal world of matter’, while the East ‘has concentrated on the transcendent
reality accessible only to man by direct intellectual intuition’ (p. 69). Guénon
wishes to shift the balance in the West back towards this ‘transcendent reality’.
Guénon develops his critique of modernity in a sequel to East and West entitled
The Crisis of the Modern World (Guénon, 2001c). In this work he criticises
humanism and the move toward the secular or the profane. This is a theme he refers
to again and again in his work, seeking to rebalance the sacred and the profane. He
believes that proper government would be spiritual rather than temporal (Guénon,
2001d). Instead the modern world denigrates religion. In Symbols of Sacred Science
(Guénon, 2001f) he argues that a key part of the decline of the West has been the
relegation of religion to merely a social phenomenon, whereby it has come to be
seen as separate from other parts of the culture. It is just another aspect of the
culture rather than something upon which civilisation itself depends.
The means of achieving this shift to the profane has been rationalism, which
Guénon sees as peculiarly modern and at the root of the scientistic and materialistic
conceits of the West. It is this rationalism that has helped greatly to induce modern
man to ‘forget everything connected with the existence of a traditional civilisation
in their countries’ (2001e, p. 193). The first task in forgetting was to ‘confine men
within the limits of their own individuality, and this was the task of rationalism’,
which, according to Guénon, ‘denies to the being the possession or use of any
faculty of a transcendent order’ (p. 193) Man becomes separated from the spiritual
and then his attention is turned ‘toward external and sensible objects, in order as
it were to enclose him, not only within the human domain, but within the much
narrower limits of the corporeal world alone; that is the starting-point of the whole
of modern science’ (p. 193–4). Materialism limits the notion of reality to the
corporeal world and denies the transcendent. Reality is ‘stripped of everything
that could not be regarded as simply ‘material’ (p. 194).
Guénon argues that a key part of the modernist project has been to insist
on ‘the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent
reduction of civilisation, in all its branches, to purely human elements’ (2001c, p.
55). This placing of the individual above all else means that material conditions
prevail and novelty and personal satisfaction have become the motivating forces
of Western societies. Guénon contrasted this with a traditional society where the
Forgetting 41
will of the individual is sublimated to the whole: ‘In a traditional civilisation it is

almost inconceivable that a man should claim an idea as his own’ (2001 cp. 56).
Waterfield (2002) backs up this criticism of individualism when he states that ‘the
idea of novelty and originality so very much prized by modern Westerners’ is
‘scarcely more than two hundred years old. Fewer still realise, as Guénon did, how
false, and consequently harmful, it is’ (p. 78).
Guénon locates progress as a product of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, just as Joseph de Maistre (1993, 1996) and the other contemporary
Counter-Enlightenment critics have argued. This has come about because the West
has diverged from the East, and the main causes of this were the Renaissance and
the Reformation, which destroyed the last vestiges of ancient tradition in Europe.
Guénon (2001d) argues that the Renaissance ‘was in reality not a re-birth but
the death of many things’ (p. 15). Much of the traditional sciences of the Middle
Ages were lost, and in its place there was left only ‘profane’ science and ‘profane’
philosophy. The decline of the West reached its nadir with the French Revolution,
which completely rejected all tradition. What became the predominant concern for
modern science and philosophy was the material and the quantifiable, and Guénon
deals with development in what is perhaps his most significant work, entitled
The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times (2001e). This is his most concerted,
and metaphysically informed, consideration of the problems of modernity. In this
work Guénon brings together many of the themes of his earlier works and links
them to his metaphysical concerns. He seeks to explain the roots of the malaise
that is modernity and alights on the overriding concern for ‘quantity’ in the modern
world. It is this need to quantify, to emphasise the material, that runs through
modern life and serves to denigrate the spiritual and hence the traditional.
Guénon argues that a consequence of quantity is uniformity, whereby being
is ‘deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical
‘units’ (p. 51). Individuals are reduced to machines that can be quantified. He then
relates this to more concrete notions:
From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ conceptions tend toward

exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one
to another. This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is
equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example
of such ‘equality’, for the reasons already give, since it would imply nothing but
a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name
of this assumed ‘equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy ‘ideals’ most dear to
the modern world, individuals are in fact directed towards becoming as nearly
alike one to another as nature allows – and this in the first place by the attempt
to impose a uniform education on everyone. It is no less obvious that differences
of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform
education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that,
although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on
the contrary very well fitted to suppress in everyone all possibilities above the
common level; thus the ‘levelling’ always works downwards: Indeed, it could
not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency
toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity. (pp. 51–2)
Guénon would never consider himself to be an explicitly political thinker. He does

not wish to concern himself with specific issues or the particular problems of the day.
His critique of equality, for its levelling down and assumptions that any individual
can be made ready for any role within society, is based on his understanding of a
traditional order and not linked to any particular political programme. Guénon is
clearly a conservative, and we might also see him as a reactionary (King, 2012).
He wishes to maintain traditional hierarchies and social structures as necessary
for an elitist understanding of the transmission of tradition. He is therefore no
democrat and no egalitarian, preferring instead to take his model from feudal or
caste societies. What he does not seek, however, is to link his traditionalism with
a particular political programme. He actively seeks to disassociate himself from
any modern political movement, unlike the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola, who
sought to influence both Italian and German fascism (Sedgwick, 2004). We should
note here that Guénon is as scathing of Nazi ideology and its attempt to appropriate
traditional symbols, such as the swastika, as he is of modern democracy. To him
Nazism and fascism are modernist aberrations with no links to genuine tradition.
Guénon seeks to distinguish between knowledge and action, and always
prioritises the former over the latter: knowledge should precede and dominate
action. Therefore political action is suspect and Guénon’s priority is rather
the exposition of tradition, with the ambition of enlightening those capable of
understanding. Clearly, the achievement of Guénon’s aims would have political
implications, but he leaves these largely unstated, being merely a by-product of
Forgetting 43
spiritual renewal. In any case, I would venture to say that we need not accept
Guénon’s anti-democratic views and we can happily ignore them without negating
much of his critique of modernity.
The problem with the West is not only that it seeks to apply this uniformity to
itself, but that it also then imposes it upon others:
The modern Westerner is moreover not content only to impose an education of

that sort at home; he also wants to impose it on other peoples, together with the
whole gamut of his own mental and bodily habits, so as to make all the world
uniform, while at the same time he imposes uniformity on the outward aspect of
the world by the diffusion of the products of his industry. (Guénon, 2001e, p. 52)
It is not enough that this model be applied to the West, but it had to be exported
and has thus become the dominant form of social organisation. This means
that modernity not only threatened the traditions of the West, but also all other
civilisations, and this threat would be backed by force if necessary. The West
actively exports its profane model and in so doing destroys traditional societies in
other parts of the world. Guénon may have an unrealistic view of the Orient, but
his view is not a narrow ethnocentric one. Not only does he favour the Orient over
the West, he took up the life of a traditional Muslim in Cairo and consistently in
his writings stresses that there are different paths to the one truth.
Part of modernity is indeed its desire, and capability, to control and bend the
world to its own aims. Westerners seek to change the environment and mould it
to their interests so that all parts of the world are working towards the aims of
progress. As Guénon puts it in The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times:
the men of today boast of the ever growing extent of the modifications they
impose on the world, and the consequence is that everything is thereby made
more and more ‘artificial’, for this is the very result that these modifications
are calculated to produce, since all their activity is directed toward a domain as
strictly quantitative as possible. Besides, as soon as the desire to produce a purely
quantitative science arose, it became inevitable that the practical applications
derived from that science should share its character; these applications as a
whole are generally designated by the name ‘industry’, and modern industry can
be said to represent from all points of view the triumph of quantity, because its
operations do not demand any knowledge other than quantitative, and because
the instruments of which it makes use, that is to say machines properly so called,
are developed in such a way that qualitative considerations come in to the least
possible extent, while men who work them are themselves limited to activity of
an entirely mechanical kind. (p. 53)
Humanity itself becomes mechanical and loses the traditional skills that have
allowed people to live as part of the world. Individuals become undifferentiated
and mere cogs in a greater entity than themselves. Guénon contrasts this with what
he terms ancient crafts, which are differentiated and based on skills, passed down
as part of the traditional, spiritually informed sciences. The effect of quantity
therefore is to drain the spiritual out of all activities and to separate humanity from
the Divine.
Guénon does not believe that individuals are interchangeable, but instead have
particular purposes, depending on their nature. This idea appears to derive from the
Hindu notion of caste and tells us much about Guénon’s conception of a traditional
society. Individuals are indeed differentiated, and these are qualitative distinctions
linked to tradition. To try to step outside one’s nature is to court disorder:
According to the traditional conception … each person must normally fulfil

the function for which he is destined by his own nature, using the particular
aptitudes essentially implicit in that nature as such; he cannot fulfil a different
function except at the cost of a serious disorder, which will have repercussions
on the whole social organisation of which he is part. (Guénon, 2001e, p. 58)
In the traditional view, Guénon states, ‘it is the essential qualities of beings that
determine their activity’ (p. 58). However, ‘according to the profane conception on
the other hand, these qualities are no longer taken into account, and individuals are
regarded as no more than interchangeable and purely numerical “units”’ (p. 58).
We can see Guénon’s argument here as a concern about levelling down.
Modernity reduces individuals to interchangeable parts with no special distinctive
features. They are not seen as differentiated or unique individuals with their own
natures. Rather they are deskilled and emptied out in order to better fulfil the needs
of material progress.
Modern industry is therefore the very opposite of the ancient crafts: ‘The
workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of
trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to
do so’ (p. 60). He is reduced merely to ensuring that the machine functions properly,
and his training is structured so as to reduce his actions to that bare minimum.
Forgetting 45
He becomes as mechanical as the machine he is working. He must complete his

actions always in the same manner ‘without having at all to understand the reason
for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine,
that will fabricate the object’ (p. 60). Guénon goes on: ‘Servant of the machine, the
man must become a machine himself, and thenceforth his work has nothing really
human in it, for it no longer implies the putting to work of any of the qualities that
really constitute human nature’ (p. 60).
VI
Guénon most certainly has an impressive body of work (23 books, including
posthumous collections of his articles and essays), and it is not obviously lacking
in scholarship despite his remaining outside the academy. He is undoubtedly a
singular writer, and one who writes with a commitment and seriousness that some
might find difficult to accept. He writes with a certainty matched by a disdain for
opposing views, which might be seen as arrogant and perhaps even deluded. Yet
his work is consistent and coherent according to its starting principles. Of course
one need not accept it, and what many might find most odd, being accustomed to
the modern, secular arguments based on an apparently empirical scientific notion
of progress, are these starting assumptions about the loss of tradition in the West.
In particular, his insistence on a distinctly spiritual dimension to this decline might
be seen as outdated and perhaps even faintly ridiculous. Guénon’s concerns for
‘sacred science’ and the hermitic and esoteric are easy to misunderstand, ridicule
and to paint as obscure and eccentric. It is precisely this connection that makes it
easy for modernists to dismiss his opposition to modernity and modern science.
Guénon seems to be taking a deliberately obscure and perverse approach in
rejecting all the normal academic assumptions. His work involves a complete
denunciation of the nostrums of contemporary social science and philosophy in
favour of a belief in the esoteric foundations of civilisation. He risks therefore
being written off as a crank and a conspiracy theorist. However, Guénon makes
absolutely no concessions to his opponents: his work is unreservedly critical and
he appears to condescend to the mainstream, so certain is he of his own rectitude.
We might suggest that Guénon’s approach is all of a piece with his defence of
tradition. He cannot hold the views he does and conciliate with modernity. His
style, and his self-certainty, are therefore necessary to his argument.
This style, and its consequences, are also what makes Guénon’s thought so
interesting to us here. What political and social conclusions he arrives at are
largely by-products of the critique of spiritual decline of the West and its rejection
of tradition. What this means is that his antimodernism is perhaps the most
complete of any contemporary critic of modernism. His work is a thoroughgoing
attempt to get beyond, or get outside, the modern modes of thinking and so see
in fundamental terms. It bases its arguments against materialism and quantity on
an understanding of the centrality of the spiritual dimension of being. It does not
restrict itself to the political or the economic, but rather derives its critique of
modernity from metaphysics. It does not base itself on the conceits of modernity,
but rather seeks to supersede it. So what makes Guénon so interesting is that he
assumes modernity is an aberration rather than the default position.
However, Guénon’s critique could not exist outside modernity, and as such it
is a creature of the modern world. Like all forms of antimodernism, it is a reaction
against the excesses of modernism. The dependency on modernity can also be
shown by looking at where Guénon’s ideas have had their influence. Sedgwick
(2004) suggests that Guénon has had some impact in Islamic countries, such as
Iran and Turkey, but not Egypt, despite the fact that he lived in the latter country
for over 20 years. Sedgwick argues this is because Iran and Turkey share with the
West the presence – or threat – of modernity. This suggests that it is not tradition
but modernity that is the prerequisite for traditional arguments such as Guénon’s.
What creates any interest in Guénon’s ideas are the threats posed by modernity.
As modernity advances, so does the opposition to it, and so we would expect
antimodern ideas to sprout in countries experiencing modernisation or where there
is a conscious threat to traditional ways of life. But where these traditional patterns
are still settled, there appears to be no demand for Guénon’s arguments. Sedgwick
suggests that virtually the entire Arab world has ignored traditionalism ‘evidently
because the Arab world is not modern enough to receive it’ (p. 271).
This dependency on modernity, of itself, poses no threat to the integrity of
Guénon’s ideas: if it is against something, then that something really ought to exist.
But Guénon’s philosophy also involves some ideas much older than modernity.
Of course this is what we would expect if Guénon were genuinely concerned
with a primordial tradition. However, as Sedgwick (2004) shows, these ideas are
themselves largely Western or at least derived from the specific Judeo-Christian
tradition.
As we have seen, one aspect of modernity that Guénon is critical of is
individualism and the idea of originality. The traditional craftsman would not
Forgetting 47
seek to innovate, but would follow the established pattern and remain within the
tradition. We should therefore not be surprised that Guénon’s ideas, despite their
distinctiveness, are not especially original. Rather, as Sedgwick (2004) states, they
are ‘composed of a number of elements, most of which have been part of Western
thought for centuries’ (p. 264). Where Guénon’s originality lies, however, is in his
ability to create ‘an entirely new synthesis out of these ideas, and then promote his
synthesis to the point where it could be taken further by others’ (p. 264).
Sedgwick suggests that Guénon’s thought is a synthesis of four elements: the
idea of inversion, that civilisation is in decline as opposed to progressing; the
view that wisdom may be found in the East; the belief in perennialism, that there
is a primordial tradition that underpins all systems of thought; and the notion of
initiation into esoteric knowledge through the following of spiritual discipline.
However, none of these four elements is original to Guénon. Sedgwick argues
that inversion, which plays such as an important part in Guénon’s thinking, is
‘an idea older than the Book of Revelation’ (p. 264). The notion that civilisation
is declining and is in need of a fundamental renewal is an ancient one consistent
with Greek and Roman thought. Likewise, Sedgwick suggests that the idea that
wisdom may be found in the Orient dates back to the early Middle Ages. The idea
of perennialism is also a longstanding one and can be found in the work of both
Marcello Ficino and Giordano Bruno in the fifteenth century. Sedgwick claims
that the idea that the Catholic Church held a monopoly of religious truth had well
and truly broken down before the end of the nineteenth century to be replaced by
an understanding that there are many ways to achieve spiritual enlightenment.
Finally, the notion of initiation can be dated back to the seventeenth century with
the growth of freemasonry. So Guénon’s thought can be seen as a unique synthesis
of several longstanding elements, all of which, according to Sedgwick, had some
currency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Guénon would not have seen his ideas as a synthesis but rather as a description
of the true nature of the world, and this is itself one of the reasons that scholars
treat him with some scepticism. Guénon’s views can be rejected because they
appear to begin with what he considers to be the ‘truth’ and the facts are fitted in
accordingly. His thought ignores time and place and instead abstracts notions to
suit his conclusions. His notions of East and West are general, non-specific and
apparently timeless. They do not depend on a particular historical context, but
instead may be seen as ideals. But, as Sedgwick argues, this criticism of Guénon
is to miss the point of traditionalism: it exists precisely to ‘claim to represent the
ultimate truth, just as religion or some types of philosophy do’ (p. 271). Guénon
is not concerned merely with rational discourse and with justifying his sources.
In this regard Guénon is operating within a completely different sphere from that
of the modern scholar, and as the history of spiritual discourse shows, sometimes
human beings construct their notions of reality in different ways. Indeed the
very idea that Guénon is being obscure, and that his approach is unacceptable as
scholarship, gives credence to his critique of uniformity.
Perhaps we need not even attempt to take Guénon on the terms of the modern
academy. He calls for a different approach and one that relies on a different path.
Whether we see him as right or wrong, or whether we feel we can accept his
arguments for a transcendent primordial tradition, there is a completeness and
rigour to Guénon’s thought, and this completeness allows us to attend to the nature
of modernity itself as a system. Guénon’s thought allows us to see modernity as
the construction of a particular mentality and not as civilisation as such. Modernity
is an option, a choice, a fork in the road made by European civilisation at one point
in time. Guénon helps us then to get beyond modernity and to see it as it, as it were,
from the outside. He does this in a manner that is ultimately more satisfying than
postmodern critics, and this is precisely because he operates entirely outside of the
conceits of modernity. Postmodernity, for all its protestations, is a product of what
it seeks to replace and it shares with modernity much of the desire for flux and
transgression. Indeed the problem with postmodernity is that it takes transgression
as an end itself and divorces it from progress. It is not, then, a return to tradition,
but rather the appropriation of tradition as a plaything.
Guénon, through his rigorous rejection of modernity as a system of thought,
allows us to transcend the desire for change and to locate ourselves within tradition.
It allows us to take tradition as a living entity, whereby we do not seek to use it
but to accommodate ourselves to it. If we accept Guénon’s argument, then it is we
who must bend to tradition, and we cannot do this from within, or even beside,
modernity. We must be against it and apart from it.
Modernity carries with it the belief that all things are possible. What Guénon
shows is that this is a delusion. Modernity is a pattern and that it is as limiting and
stifling as any notion of tradition. Modernity involves a contradiction: it promotes
individuality but demands uniformity. The result is an inability to accept what
we are and where we are. Modernity traps us in a futile cycle of aspiration and
rejection: we continue to want more and so cannot accept what we have now. But
it is only when we accept who we are and where we are that we can begin to have
anything meaningful at all. We need to stop so that we can start to remember.
Chapter 3
Absurdity
E. M. Cioran, in his work The Trouble with Being Born (1998), reminds us of the
consequences of modernity. The great modern thinkers like Kant and Hegel saw
their role as liberating human potential and helping us towards perfectibility. Yet
the result, Cioran tells us, has been less than satisfactory: ‘According to Hegel,
man will be completely free only “by surrounding himself with a world entirely
created by himself”. But this is precisely what he has done, and man has never been
so enchained, so much a slave as now’ (1998a, p. 139). In the process of trying
to make ourselves free, we have in fact enslaved ourselves. We have stripped the
world of its mysteries and no longer have any illusions. We have made the world
according to our own plans but, in doing so, we have left ourselves with nothing
to hold onto. We are at the mercy of the machines we have fabricated. All we have
left are our anxieties.
Cioran’s assessment, we might suggest, fits with a very postmodern critique of
the modern world. In the period after the fall of the Soviet Empire commentators
on the left were faced with a problem: the economic and political battle had been
decisively won by democracy and liberal capitalism. As Francis Fukuyama (1992)
informed us, we had witnessed the end of history. The ideological battle had
been settled decisively in favour of liberal democracy and the market economy.
But if capitalism was now all there was, what were academics of the left to
do? Fortunately they found a problem ready for their attention; one which they
claimed was now dominating the Westernised, post-Soviet world. This was the
problem of anxiety and risk (Beck, 1992; Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994; Dunant
and Porter, 1996). Apparently, not just many individuals, but whole populations,
were experiencing a heightened sense of anxiety about the state of the world
around them. Despite – or even because – of the ending of the Cold War and
the reduced threat of nuclear annihilation, we were now fearful of environmental
damage due to man-made climate change, the rise of AIDs, rising nationalism and
religious fundamentalism linked to mass migrations, rogue states and terrorism,
and the impact of uncontrollable new technologies (Giddens and Hutton, 2000;
Salecl, 2004). As each year went by, a new reason to be fearful was discovered
and so anxiety increased. Regardless of the end of history, we had now fallen into
a heightened anxiety. Modernity might now be post-ideological, but it was also
the age of anxiety.
What is interesting about this conception is the attempt to collectivise anxiety.
Anxiety is no longer seen as an individual complaint or condition. Instead it is
now suffered en masse, seemingly by societies as a whole. Anxiety is the modern
condition. The effect of this collectivisation means that anxiety has been removed
from the psychological field and placed firmly in the political. It has become open
to political solutions based on national and, increasingly, international government.
Anxiety has become therefore a new means to critique capitalism and liberalism
democracy but without the need to justify it on any ideological grounds.
But this form of analysis is merely part of the problem, in that it posits that the
symptoms of modernity can be dealt with by a reapplication of the very things that
have caused them. It is still based on the premise that we can change the current
structures of our world into something better, which will cause us less anxiety
because we have planned it properly this time. If only we had less globalisation,
abolished nuclear weapons, regulated capitalism more strictly, or persuaded the
Americans and Israelis to behave better, we could have a less anxious world. In
other words, we can ‘perfect’ modernity by ridding it of the causes of anxiety. But
of course this ignores the fact that the cause is modernity itself.
But Cioran sees matters rather differently. As Susan Sontag (1998) has argued,
‘Politically, Cioran must be described as a conservative. Liberal humanism is
for him simply not a viable or interesting option at all, and the hope of radical
revolution is something to be outgrown by the mature mind’ (p. 21–2). But Cioran’s
conservatism is of a deeply subversive kind: he is something of a conservative
anarchist, who brings to the table a rich mixture of cynicism, fatality and nihilism.
Sontag argues that he is not really a conservative in the modern sense, but rather
his stance is aristocratic, and this makes him an outsider with regard to our modern
conceits. If we were to have to summarise Cioran’s stance towards the modern
world, it would be to say that what we have is not really worth keeping, but then it
is all we can have and what we might get, were we to change it, would be worse.
Therefore only an idiot would try to change it.
For Cioran, the modern world is the proof of our idiocy: we have tried to
change things and continue to see this as our principal aim. The result of this is
anxiety, but not for the reasons suggested by Beck and others above. Anxiety is
Absurdity 51
inherent to all forms of modernity and is indeed a product of it: modernity creates
anxiety and this is because modernity demands change. Anxiety is the flipside of
flux and transgression. Modernity cannot accept the world as it currently is, and
so we are anxious for change. But then the effect of change is to make us anxious
about our futures and our place in the world. So we are anxious to create change
and anxious because of change. It is not, we might say, a question of status anxiety,
but of anxiety as status.
This seemed to be confirmed to me when, after shopping and lunching with my
daughter one Saturday, we caught the bus home. I sat behind a casually dressed,
middle-aged man sitting next to his partner. Like my daughter and me, they had
several plastic bags on their laps. But what caught my eye – indeed I could not
avoid noticing it – was that the man had a Bluetooth hands-free earpiece attached
to his right ear. There is perhaps nothing intrinsically strange about this, but I could
not help wondering why someone out shopping with his partner on a Saturday
afternoon would need to wear such a piece of technology. What was so urgent that
he needed to have this device in his ear whilst shopping? Both my daughter and I
had our mobile phones with us, although they had been turned off whilst we were
in the restaurant. I received no calls and frankly did not really expect to receive any.
But what I would not think of doing was to have an earpiece permanently plugged
into the ear whilst out shopping and eating in a restaurant. Of course the man in
front of me might have been on call from work, although I doubted this as he had
clearly been shopping and was using a bus so he could hardly respond rapidly to
any call. But even if he were expecting a call, how long would it have taken to
take a phone from his pocket and answer it? Can something be so important that,
whilst sitting chatting on the bus, you must have such instantaneous access? Were
he disabled in some way, then perhaps it might have been necessary, but I could
see no evidence of this.
My first thought was that it might have been a form of ostentation, and that
the man was simply showing off the latest ‘boy’s toy’. Many people do indeed
feel the need to make it known what technology they have and that they have the
facility to use it. But the earpiece was not exactly an overly expensive piece of
technology that was beyond the scope of most people, and, in any case, our chap
did not appear one for the latest zippy toy: he didn’t seem like someone just off
the trading floor.
But it then occurred to me that this might be rather more complex than this and
that we might see the man’s behaviour as a form of anxiety. If you have a piece
of technology, such as a mobile phone, then you will want to use it. A mobile
phone may be a personal device, but its portability allows it to be used in public,
unlike the traditional home-based landline phone. However, the problem with an
interactive device, such as a mobile phone, is that it depends on others: you need
someone to ring you or to have someone to ring, and if not, then you cannot use
it. You cannot show it, and so you cannot be ostentatious. The typical use for a
mobile phone might then reveal the lack of contacts you have, and show you to be
inadequate compared to others.1 So an alternative to having a device that cannot be
used is to wear one, to have it on show, and this may well serve the same purpose
as being seen to use it.
Of course it is true that the actual purpose of an object may not accord with the
way it is used. It might have been that this earpiece was not really a convenient
accessory to the man’s phone, but actually meant to serve as an ornament or as a
piece of jewellery. In general, being seen to be using such a device would be the
ideal, but this is not necessarily an essential, or even a particularly important, part
of the wearer’s intentions. The aim is the effect you believe it has on those who
see you, and so what matters is that you are making a statement about yourself.
But there is an added dimension to this. Our man might have wished to show
what technology he had access to and did this through his Bluetooth earpiece.
He was therefore letting us know his sophistication, as well as making sure
that there was no chance of missing a call when it did come. But might this
demonstration of technological access have actually ‘shown’ how little this man
needed it? The longer he did not use it, the greater the potential embarrassment
as he could not hide the fact that the device was idle. It therefore might not have
been efficiency or expedience that was driving his behaviour, but an anxiety or
desperation to be called.
This trivial little vignette, it seems to me, provides us with an opening to the
idea of anxiety as part of modernity. We feel we have to be seen to be using the
1 This anecdote predates the ubiquity of the ‘smartphone’, which of course makes
redundant any need to interact with other humans and allows you to show off your toy
without the need to have to find someone to talk to. Interestingly, however, the trend is for
these phones to get bigger and indeed to start to be replaced by even larger tablets, which
despite their convenience, are hardly discreet.
Absurdity 53
most modern technologies but, in doing so, we open ourselves up to anxiety,

and this is precisely because we are noticed. There is a sense in which we must
be seen to be keeping up with others but, in doing so, we cannot hide from the
notice of others. We cannot be ignored and so we cannot ignore how others
might regard us. The problem with modernity is that it publicises our anxieties
and so magnifies them.
Anxiety demonstrates a lack of acceptance of what we are and how we are.
By publicising ourselves, we come to see ourselves from the outside, to observe
ourselves externally as if by an observer. This serves to idealise ourselves, but
it also makes us vulnerable because our view of ourselves is now based on an
illusion. So we are anxious to live up to the ideal but fear that the illusion may be
noticed, just as when we see ourselves in the mirror and realise that our self-image
does not match the reality. This linkage between anxiety and a lack of acceptance
is the key to understanding modernity and its effects on individuals. But it also
offers us a way forward to understanding the nature of the antimodern. This is
because acceptance – of the world as it is and others as they are – is essentially the
antimodern condition, and, in essence, the rest of this essay is a study of how we
might come to an acceptance of the world around us.
II
According to Martin Heidegger (1962), anxiety and fear are different things. Fear,
he suggests, is always of something. We are fearful because of a specific entity.
However, anxiety is groundless, it has no purpose. We can feel anxious without
being able to suggest why. It can be seen as inchoate and without anything specific
attached to it. Anxiety need not be groundless – we may have a good reason to be
anxious – but it also does not need to be connected to anything specific. Instead
it might manifest itself as a general state of uneasiness. We may wake early and
feel a certain dread without being able to locate why this is so. We may feel
uncertain in a large crowd or in an unfamiliar place. We may also not be prepared
to acknowledge that we are anxious and it may only show it itself inadvertently
through our actions or the way we react to others.
This suggests that anxiety comes from within us instead of from an external
cause. While a fear might be imposed on us (in best horror film tradition), our
anxieties are what we impose on ourselves by attaching them to some external
entity. This suggests that anxiety is general and we attach it to the specific. If we
were not anxious due to one thing, then it would be caused by another.
Anxiety derives from a lack of control, which is compounded by our inability,
or unwillingness, to acknowledge this lack. We refuse to accept that we cannot
control our lives and that we cannot determine our next step. But because of this
we are unable to come to terms with the reality of our condition. We want to be
in control, and like to feel we are, but we are often not. What we want and wish
is often just beyond us; we often fail to achieve what we had hoped. Anxiety
therefore represents our inability to face something as it is, and thus accordingly
we have no proper sense of proportion or means of keeping things bounded. We
cannot place things in their proper context.
The object of our anxiety becomes our sole end. It is as if the object becomes
magnified by our anxiety. It so pervades our consciousness that we cannot see
beyond it, and so to achieve this object, or to survive it, or to get past it, is all that
matters to us. What we tend to forget, to lose sight of in our anxiety, is that this
object – be it a journey, a meeting, a debt or whatever – is usually only a stage in
a process, a means to achieve something larger. It is part of a series of events and
objects to be negotiated as part of our ordinary lives. Yet our anxiety masks this
from us so we cannot see things as they properly are.
So what is needed is some means to see what and where we are, and to find
some proportion in our lives. Modernity, I would suggest, breeds a sense of
anxiety through the illusions it creates. The illusion that we can be improved and
improve the world around us inevitably leads to anxiety because we will fail. We
will become disillusioned with what we are and where we are, but we have no way
out of this place, that allows us to keep those illusions intact. The target for critique
must therefore be the illusions of modernity, and there is no better critic than the
writer we began this chapter with.
E. M. Cioran was a Rumanian, who spent most of his adult life in France.
He was a writer of essays and aphorisms, deliberately anti-systematic and with
no regard for finding solutions to the problems he identified. He was a critic
of modernity and of positivism. As Susan Sontag argues, philosophical system
building collapsed in the nineteenth century, with an increasing implausibility
given to ‘universals’. One response, she suggests, was the rise of ideologies
– ‘aggressively anti-philosophical thought, taking the form of various “positive”
and “descriptive” sciences of man’ (1998, p. 11), such as those of Comte, Marx
and Freud. Another response ‘was a kind of new philosophising: personal (even
autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic. Its foremost exemplars:
Absurdity 55
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein’ (p. 11). This approach starts with a
belief that traditional forms of philosophical discourse have broken down, and
what are left are mutilated, incomplete discourses. Instead of the rationally
philosophical they take on another form, hence the use of aphorism, poems, notes
and critical exegesis common to the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Sontag
sees Cioran as the most distinguished post-war figure working in this tradition.
She suggests that Cioran’s kind of writing is meant for readers who have
already had the same thoughts themselves. Hence he doesn’t explain or argue,
but rather ‘an argument is to be “recognised” and without too much help’ (p. 14).
Cioran’s approach is one of problematising and stating the contradictions within
the positions of others. It seeks for no end point and asks for no definition. For
Sontag, Cioran’s writing:
… bears witness to the most intimate impasse of the speculative mind, moving
outward only to be checked and broken off by the complexity of its own stance.
Not so much a principle of reality as a principle of knowing: namely, that it’s
the destiny of every profound idea to be checkmated by another idea which it
implicitly generated. (1998, p. 12)
She contends that the ‘moral point’ of Cioran’s writing ‘is the unending disclosure
of difficulty’ (p. 15). This gets to the very heart of Cioran: he would not dream of
offering solutions – that would be absurd – but states starkly and bleakly his vision
of the human condition. In this way he is similar to Wittgenstein: as Sontag states,
‘Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is something like a disease and the job of the
philosopher is to study philosophy as the physician studies malaria, not to pass it
on but rather to cure people of it. (p. 16)
This could not be more different from the modernist view of philosophy as
prescription, as providing the cure to our current malaise. Modernity is rather an
illness in itself:
Cioran’s universe of discourse is preoccupied with the themes of sickness

(individual and social), impasse, suffering, mortality. What his essays offer is
a diagnosis and, if not outright therapy, at least a manual of spiritual good taste
through which one might be helped to keep one’s life from being turned into an
object, a thing. (Sontag, 1998, p. 27)
Cioran sees no cure; there is no way out. What he does offer is some means of
holding out against the onslaught of the modern, of holding back the virus, and of
doing it in some style.
The great virtue of Cioran’s writing is that it demonstrates such a thorough
appreciation of what he is against. He has come to his conclusions by a complete
understanding of what he does not like. He is an antimodernist who has wormed
his way inside the modern and is seeking to destabilise it from the inside. He
knows that he cannot really exist outside it, that there is nothing viable beyond
the present. As Sontag (1998) has said, in Cioran’s writings, ‘The modern habit
of fomenting revolutions against the established order in the name of justice and
equality is dismissed as a kind of childish fanaticism’ (p. 22).
The crime of modernism is to try to be what we are not, or to be somewhere
else rather than here. As Cioran states so sharply, ‘To hope is to contradict the
future’ (1999, p. 83). For Cioran, ‘It is an aberration to want to be different from
what you are, to espouse in theory any and every condition, except your own’
(1998a, p. 69). Moderns cannot look at themselves and see what is really there. As
he states: ‘Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the
apex if not the end of history’ (1998a, p. 125). But Cioran can distinguish between
what is and what ought to be, and his writing is the means of exploring this: ‘What
I know wreaks havoc upon what I want’ (1992, p. 198). And we have no excuse
for not knowing what we are: ‘Trees are massacred, houses go up – faces, faces
everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth’ (1998a, p. 172).
Cioran is misanthropic and he is cynical, as he shows when he writes: ‘To
produce is easy; what is difficult is to scorn the use of one’s gifts’ (1998a, p. 64).
Yet he writes with both brilliance and wit (which is why we are prepared to quote
him so readily). He is one of the foremost aphorists in European literature and
his comments are laced with humour, admittedly of the very blackest variety. We
should also note that there is a self-awareness, almost to the point of archness, in
Cioran’s formulations:
Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet,

bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared
he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, would ring at the door
from time to time … (1998a, p. 50)
Likewise, he is aware of the contradictions inherent in his stance: ‘My mission

is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary to a mission’ (1992, p. 119). This is
Absurdity 57
surely one of the most succinct, yet acute statements of the antimodernist position
that one could wish for. One uses the very ideals of modernity – its sense of
mission – to show how absurd such ideals are. This is something that can only be
done from within.
So Cioran knows where his cynicism and his style place him and that his work
can be readily dismissed as that of the cranky poet with nothing left to contribute,
forgotten on his deathbed. Yet he is all too often redeemed by the brilliance of his
aphorisms, such as when he states: ‘Whoever does not die young will regret it
sooner or later’ (1992, p. 15). And he has written what is perhaps the most sublime
aphorism in all European letters: ‘In a world without melancholy, nightingales
would belch’ (1999, p. 45). Cioran is a rare mix of the cultured and the cynical, but
always a brilliant one and his antimodernism is worth appreciating accordingly.
Cioran’s aphoristic style works through the use of paradox and apparent
contradiction. He brings us up short and makes us question what he means and,
in so doing, what meanings we place on the things around us. He challenges us
with his cynicism, defying us to shout, ‘Surely not!’ and to contradict him. But the
contradictions are already there in his writing. His writing is always knowing, and
so he cuts away the grounds we have for disabusing him before we can even react.
Hence he can tell us that it is only because he feels he is able to end his life at his
own choosing that he carries on living. In similar vein he records an encounter
with a friend:
The first thing I was told by a friend who had dropped out of sight for many
years: though he had accumulated a stock of poisons over a long period, he
had not managed to kill himself because he could not decide which one to take.
(1992, p. 140)
He tells us that the decline of the Catholic Church can be dated from when it
began to practise what it preached. The Church could only dominate by fear and
oppression and not actually through love. Once the general populous ceased to
fear the love of God, they felt they could safely ignore it. To return the Church to
its dominant position would require ‘a raging Pope, gnawed by contradictions, a
dispenser of hysteria, dominated by heretic frenzy, a barbarian unembarrassed by
two thousand years of theology’ (1999, p. 101). There is a similarity here to the
argument of Joseph de Maistre, a century and a half before, calling for a return
to the absolutism of Throne and Altar. The difference, however, is that, unlike de
Maistre, we are never sure whether Cioran really means it. As he tells us rather
archly: ‘Taking human affairs seriously attests to some secret flaw’ (1998b, p. 103).
Indeed one of Cioran’s major weapons is his absurd and deeply black humour. In
Cioran we see the expression of one person’s anxiety detailed in all its absurdity.
He magnifies all that blackness inside him into an almost transcendent state and
thus makes it almost a reason for living, but then he knocks it down with some
supreme act of self-deprecation.
Contrary to modern liberal thinkers, he tells us that: ‘The problem of
responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our
birth and had consented to be precisely who we are’ (1998a, p. 97). His cynicism
finds some redemption when we can laugh with him, such as when he tells us:
‘How easy it is to be “deep”: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own
flaws’ (1999, p. 7). Yet even as we laugh, there is some sense of unease that Cioran
is telling us something uncomfortably true about ourselves, something that we
do not really want to hear. While he takes us with him on his flights of wit, he is
disabusing us of our pretensions and mocking our achievements. He is telling us
that we are not really that significant, that we cannot really be ‘deep’, except for
the times when we wallow in our proper nature.
We can get the measure of Cioran’s thought by looking at how he deals with
one of his predecessors in the aphoristic style, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche
is often credited as being the biggest influence on Cioran and there are indeed
similarities in their aristocratic disdain of modernity and their use of contradiction
and the absurd to generate meaning within their thought. But despite all he takes
from Nietzsche, it is perhaps better to see Cioran as his opposite. Unlike Nietzsche,
he does not exhort the will to power, but rather what we might call the will to
ineffectuality. Unlike Nietzsche, he does not wish to replace one idol with another.
Accordingly, Cioran states that he finds Nietzsche naïve:
I hold his enthusiasms, his fervours against him. He demolished so many idols
only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects
and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He
observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither
conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even
grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to
age, to know the long scene of detachment. (1998a, p. 85)
Yes, we have to be responsible and, yes, we have nothing beyond ourselves, but this
is in no way liberating. Instead we have all too stark a statement of our actuality as
Absurdity 59
fixated beings, who use illusion to keep us from properly understanding ourselves.
Cioran refuses to look for palliatives: there are no excuses and no cures. He leaves
us with no transforming philosophy and no means of transgressing outside the
boundaries within which we are formed. We can expect nothing but what we
already have, and that the need to be disabused, to disabuse ourselves, is the task
of thought.
Cioran, as sophisticated as he is in his twists and turns of language, strips
down life to its most elemental and basic, forcing us to face those questions at the
core of our existence. Yet he also makes it clear that these are questions that we
cannot hope to answer. Cioran removes all the veneer, the fancy wrappings, of
consumption, ideology and civilisation to show us what is there beneath it. But he
can offer little in the way of comfort. All he can tell us is that we are aberrations
of the ways of nature:
Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see
it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction
is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone in nature,
is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all
costs – something, anything … (1998a, p. 193)
So where does this leave us? Have we nothing but the bleak conclusion that
modernity has failed and that there is nothing that can replace it? Cioran is neither
a philosopher of despair, nor does he offer a cure for depressives. All is black and
bleak and there is no hope, unless, that is, we are able to recognise that all is black,
bleak and hopeless. Once we appreciate this, we can perk up and get on with our
lives in the only manner we can. We will have recognised what we have and where
we are and, in doing, so we will see our dreams of utopias and perfection as the
absurdities that they are, as nothing more than running away from ourselves.
I would argue that Cioran’s view of human life is certainly vulgar and cynical.
But it is at the same time inspiring, in that he states what our limits are, what
motivates us, and so we can come to what the possibilities actually are for us.
As we have already stated, Cioran reminds us of Joseph de Maistre.2 Both write
with the same mixture of the apocalyptic and the cynical and with the same
rhetorical flourishes that perversely highlight the most base of human desires and
interests. Both thinkers seek to ground humanity in their most animal qualities,
2 Cioran wrote about de Maistre in one his most famous essays: see Cioran (1992).
yet through this – through this appreciation of our own nature – we can, perhaps
perversely, transcend where we are. Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers that de
Maistre so vehemently opposes, we are philosopher and murderer, salon raconteur
and executioner, adviser to princes and reservoir of base fluids. These are not
contradictions, but rather necessary parts of what and who we are. When we forget
one half of this, we paint ourselves as civilised and sophisticated peoples who can
look back at disdain on our ancestors, but we soon fall into abuse and terror. We
are creatures of contradiction, not of rationality. We are absurd mixtures of the
gracious and the base, of the cultured and the depraved, of the intellectual and the
indolent. Modernity can be presented as a flight from this basic condition and the
result is an anxiety that comes from the separation of our image of ourselves from
our true nature.
Cioran is a relentless thinker who bangs us on the head when we start to
dream. He shows there is no way out of our condition and that we cannot be
too proud of what we might have achieved. Indeed, as he tells us, we should,
‘Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fuelled by a
quotation’ (1992, p. 169).
Chapter 4
‘I’m good’
A strange transformation overcame people in Britain in the early years of the

twenty-first century. When they were asked how they were, instead of saying
that they were ‘fine’ or ‘well’, they now preferred to say that they were ‘good’.
People had apparently become, for reasons that are still not clear, more certain
of their moral rectitude and wished this to be more widely known. They wished
others to know that they were ‘good’ people, preferring not to leave it to the
judgement of others.
Indeed what judgement actually matters other than our own? We are not
prepared to let others judge us, to have our lives dissected by outsiders with no
stake in what we have made for ourselves. We are the arbiters of our lives and
expect no one to inform us of any error. This is but another aspect of the lack of
acceptance that I have suggested is typical of modernity. This lack of acceptance
takes the form of what Vladimir Solovyov (1985) refers to as egoism, which he
places in opposition to individuality. We are, Solovyov suggests, possessors of
‘absolute significance and worth’ (p. 42). He goes on to state that: ‘In every human
being there is something absolutely irreplaceable, and one cannot value oneself
too highly … Failure to recognise one’s own absolute significance is equivalent to
a denial of basic human worth’ (pp. 42–3). We are thus to see ourselves as distinct
individuals who have an intrinsic worth. But if we stop here we are left only with
egoism, which is something Solovyov feels we should try to avoid:
The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness
and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself
in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same
significance. Recognising himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact
he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them
only an external and relative value. (p. 43)
The error is not, then, to denigrate oneself, but to focus only on oneself and not to
see others as being as significant as we are. In order words, egoism is where we
only promote ourselves as ‘good’. The emphasis on our own ‘goodness’ relegates
others to a subsidiary position, whereby they are only seen from our orbit, from
that position that most matters to us.
Solovyov was writing about the meaning of love, which he sees in terms of our
relations to the Divine. His is indeed a fine argument, but I wish to take a more
prosaic path and suggest that Solovyov’s description of egoism can be taken as
a particular trait of modernity. This trait can be defined, if rather inelegantly, as
the materialisation of human relationships. By this I mean the manner in which
individuals use others as means rather than ends. It is when individuals are centred
only on themselves and see others as things to be consumed.
This trait has been described acutely by a thinker who could not be accused
of harbouring any deep-seated antimodernist tendencies. However, antimodernist
or not, Manuel Castells, in a book-length series of interviews with Martin Ince,
describes the distinctly modernist idea of children as assets to which adults have a
right to acquire and subsequently rights over. He states:
In the developed world, people often consume children, not produce them. They
have them to keep themselves happy – instead of solidarity, people feel the need
to keep their own needs satisfied. So children are the ultimate consumer good.
We don’t see them as part of ourselves, collectively or individually: we tend
to see them as one of the things in our life instead of seeing ourselves in our
children, which reveals our society at its most destructive. (Castells and Ince,
2003, p. 77)
People have children for their own purposes and do not see it as part of a wider
social responsibility. Children are mere possessions that express the person we
feel we are or want to be. Hence if a woman decides she wants to be a first-time
mother at 66, and has the money to undertake the artificial processes involved,
then she has the ‘right’ to do so.1 The welfare of the child is seen as less important
than the woman’s right to have it. It is nobody’s business but hers.
Modern society places abstract aspiration over concrete social relationships.
What we aspire to is more important than our duties to others. In 2013 the UK
government announced plans to subsidise childcare, but only for single parents
1 http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2432291/Mum-66-is-oldest-in-
world.html.
‘I’m good’ 63
or households in which both parents work. Support would not be provided to

so-called ‘stay-at-home’ mothers and this was justified on the grounds that the
government wished to support ‘hard working’ and ‘aspirational’ families. The
government wished to encourage work and seemingly felt able to disregard the
interests of the children of these families.2 Of course we might argue that the
government is merely doing what a majority of households want, but the policy
does suggest a particular priority that places an aspirational lifestyle over the
interests of children. What matters is where we want to be, not what where we are
now. We are concerned with who we could be, and not who we actually are.
This idea of lifestyle over responsibility for others seems now to extend to a
parent’s right to return a child if they do not fulfil their expectations. In 2010 an
American woman returned a 7 year-old Russian boy she had adopted – by putting
him on a plane to Moscow on his own – because he apparently had behavioural
problems. The woman claimed she was lied to by the Russian authorities regarding
the scale of the child’s behavioural problems and so asked for the adoption to be
annulled.3 In another case a couple in Oklahoma in 2009 asked the courts for the
‘right’ to return their adopted son who was violent and had severe psychiatric
problems.4 The couple argued that they were not treating the child merely as
a commodity, but that they should be able to give him away and that adoptive
parenthood should be treated differently from natural parenthood. However, it
does appear that the problem with the child was that he did not live up to their
expectations, and so they wished to return him. The child was indeed being treated
as little more than any other faulty good that did not perform as it should.
We might suggest, along with Castells, that the more affluent we become
the harder it is to give up our lifestyles and the easier it is to treat our children
as secondary to that lifestyle. After all, we can justify our behaviour by saying
that they too will benefit from our increased affluence. If we work hard, we will
achieve our aspirations and then we will be happy. This may involve sacrifices
along the way, but all will be well in the end. But what we actually have here is the
modernist mantra of progress brought down to the personal level. We have an end
in sight, manifested in our aspirations, and there cannot legitimately be anything
2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/georgeosborne/9966924/George-
Osborne-Government-here-to-help-families-who-go-out-to-work.html.
3 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1264744/American-sends-adopted-
Russian-boy-behavioural-problems.html.
4 http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/tony-melissa-wescott-oklahoma-return-
adopted-son/story?id=9387389#.UVxphr_V1UQ.
put in our way to prevent us from attaining that end. The role of government is to
support our aspirations and not to judge them.
In this chapter I want to explore some of these issues. This discussion of course
is a continuation of the thread of anxiety that we have encountered in the previous
chapter. The materialisation of relations is very much a problem caused by a lack
of acceptance. It is part of the anxious state of modernity. But I also want to start
to point to a way out, to begin to define the antimodern condition by what it is.
So this chapter begins to suggest ways in which we can and do live differently
from the materialism of modernity. This will be developed rather more fully in the
chapters that follow.
My approach in this chapter is to rely on literary and cinematic examples to
press my case. Fiction and film are particularly fruitful ways of drawing together
subjective experience – what happens within families – and general or even
universal themes – what these experiences say about the culture they are part of.
Clearly, the examples I have chosen are not definitive and will not satisfy those
who are only persuaded by the purported rigour of a more scientific approach.
Yet what we are discussing here is not science but a cultural condition, and so the
cultural artefacts of literature and cinema are valid expressions of that condition.
II
Vladimir Solovyov (1985) shows us that egoism involves not the denigration of
the self, but the denigration of others. It is where we take our own significance to
denote our superiority over others. We are too important to be concerned about
others. But, as Solovyov points out, this is not because of a misguided view of
the importance of the individual but is due to an inability to see that our own
significance indicates the significance of all others. The problem is that we are
prepared to use others as the means to fulfil our own ends in the misguided belief
that our ends are superior. Accordingly, others are subsidiary to us, and they can
be reduced to material which we feel able to mould as we wish.
But this often does not take the form of cold calculation or involve overt
cruelty. The use of others may not take the form of slavery, but may rather be
simply a case of a lack of sight. We just do not see the needs of others, nor do we
appreciate the effect that our actions have on others. We are so engrossed with our
own significance – with our own ‘goodness’ – that we are blind to the effect our
actions have on others.
‘I’m good’ 65
This form of materialisation depends on our ability to dominate others. There

is always the potential for conflict between rival egoisms, between myself and
another who feels equally ‘good’. In practice this means that materialisation will
most often take place in private spaces rather than in public. Public conflict can
be policed and rival egoisms regulated. But in the private sphere there will only
tend to be self-regulation and self-control. However, it is precisely within the
private sphere where imbalances between rival egoisms will be at their greatest,
particularly that between parent and child. One adult may not be able to use
another as a commodity in the public sphere, yet a parent may use a child as such
within the domestic environment. As Manuel Castells has suggested, children in
modern societies have become possessions that are consumed. We do not live for
our children, but they live for us. We do not bend to their expectations, but they
are shaped by ours. Children become things that we own, symbols of our egoism
and means by which we manifest our ‘goodness’. We do not do this deliberately
or in any cruel and calculating manner. Rather we act in this way because that is
what modernity demands of us: it demands that our egoism be expressed and that
nothing be allowed to hamper it.
This situation becomes particularly apparent in the case of the ‘great man’,
someone whose achievements seem to outshine any particular aspect of his personal
life. One interesting example is the architect, Louis Kahn. He was undoubtedly
one of the most significant architects of the latter half of the twentieth century,
building several iconic buildings in the USA and in South Asia. Yet his personal
life was both mysterious and an example of egoism allowed to run untrammelled,
which had consequences for those close to him.
Louis Kahn died when his son, Nathaniel, was a small child. Thirty years later
Nathaniel made a film about his father (My Architect, 2003) in which he tries to
get to know his father through his work and through some of those people who
did know him. Nathaniel rather poignantly states that we, all of us having been the
child of someone, live in mystery. We live in the mystery of our parents: where
did they really come from; why did they make the choices that they did? We ask
these questions because these choices impact on others – on us – and there will be
casualties. In this case, Nathaniel was Kahn’s illegitimate child from a relationship
with a former colleague. Despite supporting the woman and their son, Louis would
not leave his wife and their daughter. Nathaniel subsequently found that he had
another half-sister, again the result of liaison with a junior work colleague.
My Architect is deeply engrossing as we follow Nathaniel in his search for his
father. The film can be seen as sympathetic to his father, and it certainly shows
that Louis was an architect of some vision. Yet the film is also about the effect that
egoism can have on others. The film, intentionally or otherwise,5 is a testament to
one strand of modernity. Louis Kahn took what he wanted and did so because he
could. He did not act in a particularly cruel manner, but he was selfish. He might
have wanted to give something back to those women who bore him children, but
he did not, presumably because he treasured his position, his marriage and his
career more than his alternative families. There is a rather sad scene towards the
end of the film in which Nathaniel presses his now elderly mother on whether
Louis ever would have left his wife for them. She is adamant that he was about
to do so just before he died, but there is a desperation in her voice, as if she were
really trying to convince herself. As viewers of this very personal conversation
between mother and son we sense that she is deluding herself and that Nathaniel,
for all the love he has for his mother, and the admiration he has for his father,
knows this. Louis might have said he would leave his wife for his alternative
family, but he never did and most probably never would have done. And the reason
for this is that he never had to: Louis was never placed in the situation in which
he had to choose and perhaps he never would have been put into such a position.
Neither the children nor the women who bore them could ever be Louis Kahn’s
equals, and because they loved him, they could exert no leverage on him.
But whatever the strength of Kahn’s position, his actions had consequences.
He had deeply affected the lives of others and did so without any laws being
broken and without, in modern terms, any great breach of society’s moral norms.
His actions have doubtless been replicated by many thousands of men, some well-
known, but most of them not.
My Architect is an attempt to unravel the mystery that parents present to their
children. Yet, because Nathaniel Kahn never really knew his father, much of the
mystery remains. To discover the dynamics of a relationship between a successful
parent and a seeking child we need to look elsewhere. One of the most acute
observers of human relationships was the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Throughout
his career he made films that centre on the intensity of relationships and how
5 I do not presume that Nathaniel Kahn would agree with my analysis of the film’s
purpose or of my evaluation of his father. This is my interpretation, but one I hope that is
not unreasonable.
‘I’m good’ 67
these turn on the balance between the egoism of the participants. In Bergman’s
films there are characters who are selfish, driven and determined to get what they
want. And all around them are the casualties, the victims of this selfishness. These
victims are often silent and stoical; they expect to carry their burdens, knowing
there is nothing else they can do. Nowhere is this shown better than in Bergman’s
late film, Autumn Sonata (1978). The film tells of the visit of Charlotte, a world-
famous concert pianist, to her daughter, Eva and Eva’s husband Viktor, a pastor in
rural Sweden. Charlotte and Eva have not been together for seven years, in which
time Charlotte’s partner has died and Eva’s 4 year-old son has drowned. The film
centres on the relationship between mother and daughter, which culminates in
an outpouring of all Eva’s repressed anger, love and longing and the ever-more
pathetic attempts at self-justification and denial by her mother.
Charlotte had put her career above her family. In the film we see flashbacks
of Eva eagerly waiting for her mother to finish practising or to return home from
a concert tour. But on each occasion Charlotte quickly dismisses her daughter,
claiming tiredness or a lack of time. We sense the effect of her mother’s absences
on Eva and the longing this causes. When her mother is due to return, Eva is
excited almost to the point of illness. Yet she gets little back from her mother when
she does finally appear.
Eva is continually anxious to please her mother, yet is continually fearful
that she will fall below her mother’s expectations, or even whether her mother
will really notice her at all. This is shown so very painfully in a scene in which
Charlotte listens to Eva play the piano. Charlotte’s look is one of disappointment
and sadness, and Eva plays nervously knowing she cannot possibly match her
mother’s virtuosity of the hopes she might had for her daughter. But Charlotte only
serves to make matters worse by treating it as an opportunity for instruction, as if
Eva were merely a lazy music pupil. She does not encourage her daughter or show
her any love, but rather seeks to correct.
Eva is the very model of the repressed child, unable to speak out against, or
stand up to, her dominating parent. She holds her mother in awe, but also fears her.
As they rake over their feelings long into the night, Charlotte expresses surprise
that Eva has never been able to speak to her of what she feels and what she wants.
All Eva can say in reply is: ‘How could I tell you?’ What means has Eva had and
what possibility has there been to stand up to her mother, to present herself as an
equal and to get beyond the carapace of adult confidence and competence? But
while this starts as a discussion of a mother dressing her daughter as she saw fit, it
soon takes a more distressing turn. Charlotte had forced Eva to have an abortion
against her will, when what Eva wanted was to marry her lover and keep the baby.
It is clear that this and other issues cannot be talked through at the time – Eva
acted as Charlotte directed her to – and that they have built up so that they can no
longer be resisted, and now the dam has been breached the recriminations cannot
be stopped.
Another source of conflict between Charlotte’s egoism and her children’s needs
comes to light when Eva informs her mother that she now has her disabled sister,
Helena, living with her. She has kept this from her mother for fear she would not
then come to visit, and it quickly becomes clear that, even though she cannot avoid
seeing her, Charlotte wishes to have nothing to do with her crippled and immobile
youngest daughter. Eva seems wary of burdening her mother with Helena. There is
still this sense that her mother is somebody special who should not to be troubled
with everyday concerns, so much so that Eva feels the need to apologise to her for
Helena’s presence.
The lack of sense of what it means to be a parent shows itself in Charlotte’s
inability to understand the relationship that Eva insists she still has with her son,
Erik, who drowned when he was 4 years old. Eva has kept Erik’s room as it was
and often sits in there. She admits to feeling that Erik is still there next to her and
that she talks to him as she sits in his room or walks in the countryside. This is
the only really vital relationship she has. It is the only connection that she admits
is alive, unlike the relationships with her mother, her largely silent husband and
her sister, none of whom, in their different ways, can communicate with her. Eva
is locked within this internal world and it is only in her relationship with her dead
son, morbid as it may appear to others, that there is any sign of love.
At the end of the film we sense the isolation, the longing and the loneliness
of Eva as she walks on her own – or is she alone? – and in voiceover she reads
out a letter to her mother, in which she apologises for what she has said and done
during the visit. Eva wishes to take the blame and still absolves her mother of
any responsibility. The inadequacies of the relationship are the fault only of Eva
and not Charlotte. In the very last scene of the film we see Charlotte riding in a
train carriage with her agent, seeking to defend herself and get confirmation that
she is a good person and a good mother. And of course while she is seeking this
reassurance, she is moving further away from what she cannot deal with. Charlotte
can only see the world with herself at the centre and she has been doing this for so
long that nothing can now alter it. All of those around know that they have to bend
to her, to be mere satellites that orbit around her.
‘I’m good’ 69
Charlotte does not want the burden of being a mother and resents the imposition
of parenthood. Yet for both her daughters she is someone they seek to impress
and to get close to. They offer her unconditional love and accept that it is their
fault when it is not reciprocated. In the film there is an acceptance of the way the
relationship is and will be. Charlotte cannot change – there can be no pressure on
her sufficient to force her to do so – and so it is her daughters who must respond.
They must accept the distance as the only relationship on offer.
Charlotte, we should remember, is not a monster, and she is loved by her
children. She is driven, and many might see this ambition as admirable. She
has maintained a successful career and in many ways she is an example of
one who aspires, works hard and so achieves. From the outside, looking at her
public persona, we would see the successful artist and we might appreciate the
sacrifices that this has involved – the travelling, the practice and so on. But
Bergman does not show us this. Instead he shows us Charlotte’s success from
the perspective of those who are closest to her but who cannot really share in
it, and we see that this success has actually diminished any closeness that there
might have been. Charlotte’s success has been at the expense of those who most
love her and who depend on her. Her children are possessions whom, at one time
at least, she chose to have around, but whom she now finds troublesome and a
burden. Both she and her daughters seem to believe that she is too special to
have to bear that burden. Her daughters have to be subsidiary to her egoism, to
her desire to appear to be ‘good’.
Bergman’s film is an acute observation of the power relations within a family,
and it allows us to view some of the effects of modernity. We can suggest that
the modern condition is one in which aspiration is placed above constraint, and
in which any limit placed on the egoism of the individual is seen as a breach of
their rights and so prevents their due progression to the state they are entitled to
attain. This form of individualism treats each person as an atom, as a separate and
separated entity whose personal aims are paramount. The modern understanding
of the individual is framed without regard to otherness, as if the law can only
represent the isolated individual without any concern for the effects that person’s
actions might have. The individual has rights and that is all that can be considered.
There can be no regard for the fact that this individual is merely one amongst
many. There is only ‘the individual’ as an abstract entity.
This is the cost of making aspiration the supreme goal of political life. It
justifies and necessitates the use of others as mere things. By abstracting the
notion of ‘the individual’ and distinguishing it from those of us who – as
real people – have to live through our relationships, modern society becomes
dominated by egoism, self-centredness and the neglect of others.
III
We now need to turn a corner and try to understand what is really good. We have
focused much of our attention so far in this essay on the problems of modernity:
its forgetfulness, its absurdity and its selfishness. But if we want to go backwards
to the antimodern, we have to suggest why it is worth the effort. So just what is
it in our lives that makes it properly good, and how does this differ from what we
say when we are asked how we are? What is the difference between being ‘good’
and actually leading a good life? If the antimodern condition is worth arguing for,
we need to be able to substantiate how it will be better. In the rest of this chapter
I want to start to address this question and will do so by again relying on fiction,
this time in the form of a novel by John Irving. This discussion will open up some
of the issues and concepts that will be developed more fully in the subsequent
chapters.
Irving’s novel, A Widow for One Year (1998), is about coming to terms with
what we are and where we are. In the terms of my discussion here it is about
eventually holding egoism in check. The novel tells us that pure egoism can be
worked through, given the right conditions. The novel tells the story of a writer,
Ruth Cole, from her childhood to her early middle age. The story is told by an
unsuccessful writer called Eddie O’Hare and is in three parts. The first part takes
place one summer when Ruth is 4 years old. Eddie is hired as an assistant to Ruth’s
writer father Ted, but he ends up having an affair with Ruth’s mother Marion, and
looking after Ruth, who is loved, but neglected, by her parents. The second part
details Ruth’s life when she is a successful writer in her mid-30s. She marries,
has a child, but then her husband dies. The third part occurs when she in her early
40s, coming to terms with widowhood and beginning a new relationship. Eddie
struggles as a writer, but drifts through the lives of the main protagonists and ends
up again with Marion. As with all of Irving’s novels the story spans a number of
decades, is complex and is full of black humour dependent upon the story’s own
inner logic. However, why the story matters for this discussion here is that it details
the path that one woman takes towards acceptance and how this is achieved.
While the novel is full of vivid characters, the stable focus of the novel is the
house in rural Vermont that Ruth grew up in and to which she returns after the death
‘I’m good’ 71
of her father and her husband. The first part of the novel deals with one summer
when Ruth is 4 years old. Her parent’s marriage is under strain as a result of the
death of their two teenage sons a few years earlier. Later in the novel we learn that
the parents were culpable in the death of the boys in a road accident and that the
birth of another child – Ruth – was an attempt to compensate for the loss. Ted and
Marion have covered the passageways of the house with photos of the boys, and
one of Ruth’s pleasures is having her parents explain the circumstances of each
photo. Ruth knows the background to each photo by heart and often wants to be
shown them, seeking reassurance in the stories. But Marion sees more significance
in these pictures of her dead boys than in her flesh-and-blood daughter, whom
she spends little time with. Ruth is a child created not for herself but in a failed
attempt to offset the loss felt by her parents. The house in this part of the novel is
a shrine to the two lost boys. Throughout this part of the story Ruth is frightened
by noises in the house, which often cause her to awake and seek the comfort of
her parents and the photos. These noises are there nagging at Ruth, almost out of
hearing, and just beyond her so she can never catch what is being said. The noises
are elusive, just like the presence of her two brothers. At the end of this part of the
novel Marion leaves taking all but one of the photos on the walls.
In the second half of the novel we see Ruth in her 30s when she is a successful
novelist, and much of this part is concerned with strange happenings concerning
the murder of an Amsterdam prostitute. Ted still lives in the Vermont house,
changing it in ways to suit himself. In the third part of the novel Ted dies and
leaves the house to Ruth, who returns there with her second husband. Even though
this house is full of past trauma and loss, scars, and bare patches where things
like photographs used to be, it is still the family home, and Ruth cannot bear to
give it up. Instead the house becomes important to her in helping her deal with the
desertion of her mother and the loss of both her father and her first husband.
Marion, however, could not bear to remain in the house. But this was not
because it was full of bad memories: she took all those memories with her when
she removed the photos. It was not that she wanted to part with her memories, but
rather that she could not abide sharing them with the living, with people whom
she associated with the destruction of that part of her past life, and who reminded
her of her guilt every time she saw them. But by taking these memories away, it
seemed that the house and people in it could then change and develop. It stopped
being a shrine and became again a place that could breathe, where people could
work and change in their own ways. So it is important that Irving describes how
both Ted, after Marion leaves, and Ruth, after she inherits the house, can make the
significant changes to it that they have always wanted to. The house is therefore
both a place for dealing with the undercurrents in the family relationships and a
place to reside once these undercurrents have been settled. Like the voices just
out of proper hearing, there are some issues that can only be raised obliquely, not
addressed directly. But the house is also a source of resilience from which Ruth
and Ted can draw strength. The house can be redesigned and changed, yet it will
still support and contain the household. It remains the place to which they can
return and find solace, and all the main protagonists return to it, even Marion in
the closing pages of the novel, who comes back to see her daughter and grandson
in the house she left nearly 40 years before. The house is the hub around which all
the action takes place and to which all things come back. At the end, however, the
place is exorcised and one feels that everything is finally in the open. All things
can be discussed and dealt with so that there are no longer voices and noises under
the floor.
Ruth is a character who is really good, unlike her parents who no longer see
beyond themselves. She is good not because of any particular virtue, but because
of what she is able to do. Unlike her mother who is stuck in those memories that
she wants to keep entirely for herself, Ruth is able to accept her life as it comes and
to deal with others as they are, not as she might wish them to be. She is, and this is
shown in the role played by the Vermont house, in place. Ruth is located and has
achieved this through an acceptance of what she is, who she is and where she is.
This is precisely what is so hard to achieve within modernity, where one is
always being asked to strive for what is not there yet, and may never be, and where
one is forced to look beyond today in the hope that what we are promised will
come true. Ruth forsakes her egoism and, in so doing, accepts the individuality of
both others and herself. She is able to see what is irreplaceable in others as well
as in herself. Ruth is good because she knows her place and understands what
it means to come home. And it is this understanding that brings us closer to the
antimodern condition.
Chapter 5
Complacent
Francois Jullien in his book In Praise of Blandness (2004) offers us his reading
on the Chinese concept of shi. He defines this as blandness, and immediately we
in the West are put off by the term. We see it as an insult: to be bland means
to be nondescript, to be unnoticed, to be neither one thing nor the other. Yet
Jullien celebrates the term and wishes us, as he suggests the Chinese do, to see
it as a blessing, as something to be earnestly desired. By blandness Jullien means
detachment, or a condition in which we do not actively seek to differentiate. This,
he tells us, is not a negative quality. According to him blandness is ‘that phase
when different flavours no longer stand in opposition to each other but, rather,
abide within plenitude’ (author’s emphasis, p. 24). He goes on:
The blandness of things evokes in us an inner detachment. But this quality

is also a virtue, especially in our relations with others, because it guarantees
authenticity. It must also lie at the root of our personality, for it alone allows us
to possess all aptitudes simultaneously and to summon up the appropriate one in
any given situation. (p. 24)
Being detached, we can relate sincerely to others: we do not appear extreme and
do not latch on to any particular quality in others. As individuals we are rounded,
with a mix of qualities held in balance. So blandness is not the lowest common
denominator, where we are incapable of separating things, but it rather allows us
to hold them all together and so we are ready to deploy the necessary faculty once
it is called upon. We show ourselves as a rounded whole, not as people who are
dependent upon one particular characteristic.
Jullien describes blandness as non-differentiation, where ‘no one flavour attracts
us more than another’ (2004, p. 44), and so ‘we maintain an equal balance among
all the virtual forces at work … and let the logic inherent in existence play itself out
naturally on its own. Preference alone is the source of trouble, and only flavour is
flawed’ (p. 44). No one thing is necessarily better than any other and to choose one
often creates a stir. When we discriminate, we tip the balance and so risk moving
to one extreme or another. We are not seeking transgression, or even to come to a
conclusion. Our life is an ongoing process with no purpose beyond itself. As Jullien
states: ‘Reality projects no meaning beyond itself, and nothing else lends it variety
or attraction. Blandness characterises the real in a way that is complete, positive and
natural’ (p. 45). Blandness-detachment means not being ‘called’ by any extremity; it
means we have no project; there is no message we wish to send and no direction that
we are obliged to follow: we, so to speak, just are.
So, for Jullien, this quality of blandness is not a soporific balm for our actions
but a means by which we can stay in place, and one by which we stay balanced
between extremes, between the divergent flavours that might fall upon our palate.
We do not eschew all choices, but rather we hold them all together. We rein in the
divergent and lash them together into a balanced whole and, in doing so, we retain
our naturalness. Of course this means, too, that little that we do is special. Much
of what we will do is ordinary (King, 2005), in the sense that it remains within our
normal frame of reference. But this has to be so if we are to live a life without fear
and transgression.
In this chapter I wish to consider what it means to be balanced and so to take
blandness seriously as a positive faculty that we can relish. I shall explore what it
means for us accept the world around us as it is. My aim is to chart a path towards
acceptance and to so this with the minimum of movement. This involves a journey
through ambivalence and complacency to a place where we can be self-absorbed.
Like blandness, these concepts – ambivalence, complacency, self-absorption –
will most often be seen as negatives, and we might be told that we should avoid
them. Yet I wish to suggest that the antimodern condition rests on these concepts
and, far from being negatives, they are the very things upon which our normal
lives depend. Our lives are conditioned and maintained by their very ordinariness
and by our repugnance of transgression. To be in the antimodern condition is to
accept things as they are. We want things to stay as they are and only change
when to do so will conserve and protect us and what we love. Having shown the
problems with the modern, the rest of this book is an attempt to justify why we
should try to keep things just as they are.
Complacent 75
II
Changing direction in the way we live is difficult. We may make resolutions, we

may appear determined to change, but often this is short-lived. Certain ways of
behaving are so ingrained and resonate so fully with how we live and think that
they are hard to break free of. Quite often these established ways are so embedded
because they are enjoyable and we have grown used to them so that we no longer
really notice we are doing them. It is this aspect of our lives, its transparency and
taken-for-granted ordinariness, that makes any change so difficult to achieve and
to maintain. It is difficult to keep moving in a new direction when we are ‘trained’
to go in another. Under pressure, or when we are busy, we will revert back to the
old ways without thinking.
And, of course, we know that changing one habit means changing others. If
we try to give up smoking we may also have to forego drinking or avoid meeting
up with certain friends who are smokers and who may encourage us to light up.
We may have a drink of an evening, and so if we really want to relax, why not
have a cigarette as well? To change one habit may mean altering others and so
the costs start to mount in terms of inconvenience or even lost friendships. The
consequences of a change start to escalate and there may come a point when we
must choose what is most important to us. Perhaps we want to hold on to the
convivial friendship of our fellow smokers more than we want to give up the habit
ourselves; or we may think that giving up drinking is too hard and so we keep on
smoking as well. But at different times the balance of these habits changes and
so the relative costs alter. Thus a person who has failed to give up smoking many
times may finally succeed and never smoke again. Or it may be that someone
gives up and does not smoke for many years, but then they begin again because
of a particular incident or when their will is weakened. All this is of course well-
known and well-documented. Yet it becomes no more predictable as a result. As
the work of Jon Elster (1998, 2000) shows, we are dealing here with the limits of
rational behaviour, where weakness of will, addiction and purposive choice all
interact. The particular history and psychology of individuals make it hard to state
that any one person in a given situation will respond in a particular manner. All
we have, as Elster (1998) concedes, are mechanisms that help us to understand
how a situation may have come about. But these mechanisms are not predictive or
related to any functionality, but are explicable on a post factum basis only. Elster
states that in trying to understand a person’s aversion to alcohol, we might look to
their parents’ behaviour as an explanatory mechanism. The person may be reacting
because her parents were alcoholics and so has learnt the effects it can have on
her relationships, income and health. However, she may also act in the way she
does because she has been brought up in a teetotal household and has been told to
avoid the ‘demon drink’. Either version could help us explain the child’s aversion
to alcohol, but without providing any sense of direct causality. The important limit
here is the inability to generalise from any specific case. What it does tell us,
however, is that people act for reasons and that we can trace these back by looking
at certain events or conditions – what Elster terms mechanisms – in their lives.
Following Elster, we can argue that the choices we make depend on the
interaction of our beliefs, the information we have access to, as well as the weakness
or strength of our will to resist certain forms of behaviour. Our propensity towards
or against any particular action can be altered and conditioned by our beliefs, by
the amount of information we have available to us, and by our propensity towards
addiction and the ability to resist temptation. So someone brought up as a Muslim
may be able to resist alcohol, and the same might apply to a medical doctor who is
conversant with the effects of excess alcohol consumption on a person’s health. Yet
not all doctors are teetotal and, while this may be because they understand what is
a safe level of consumption, it could just as well be because of their fondness for
a social drink with friends. Some people know when to stop drinking and can be
firm in sticking to their limits, while others find it easier to give in to temptation.
Some people lose their faith and change their beliefs and this alters other aspects
of their behaviour, such as their preparedness to drink alcohol.
Yet, for most of us, most of the time, our beliefs are set, the information we
have is fixed and we have to make do with the particular character that we have.
We might wish to be a different sort of person from the one we are, and we might
seek to change ourselves, but doing so is difficult. What Elster sees as mechanisms
– those things that lead us to act in the manner we do – are often substantial and
fixed in our lives. We cannot alter the behaviour of our parents. We do not live
life as a torrent but as a meander. Our lives are slow moving, determined by the
boundaries set by our history, our disposition and our beliefs. As a result we are
seldom at the mercy of the new and the different and so we can continue to act as
we always have.
What helps us to avoid change is that we tend to operate in ruts (King, 2005).
We move in well-grooved tracks between known places. We come and go along
the same paths such that they have become well-worn. We are creatures of habit,
and for most of us, most of the time, we do not see this as being particularly
problematic. Moving in ruts has the effect of insulating us from change. We need
Complacent 77
not place our feet carefully and watch every step. We know where we are going
and how to get there.
This brings us to perhaps the most important factor that determines how we
live: we live in the banality of the ordinary. We act and use things in the way we
do simply because we can. Life, for most of us, most of the time, is not a struggle.
We are not involved in a constant battle with others for resources or for supremacy
over the earth; it is not the survival of the fittest, or a war of all against all. Most of
us, most of the time, find we can just get on and do much of what we want. We can
do this without being inconvenienced and without inconveniencing others, and we
would be surprised if life were really any other way. Life is not always, or even
often, difficult. Things just are, and we can accept that this is the way of the world.
Our lives, we might suggest, are characterised by their blandness.
When we look at the world we see it as we always have done. We do not expect
it to be radically changed from the last time we ventured out, nor do we have to
recreate it every time we look. The world is simply the way it is and we know this
to be the case. We know of things today because of what we did and saw yesterday
and the day before that. We are so certain of this that we do not even have to
recognise the fact that things do not change. We need not describe a world that
continues to be present. We need not think about that of which we remain a part.
The use we make of things does not have to be obviously meaningful. We do
not tend to reflect on the present and say, ‘What I am doing now is significant,
important and meaningful’. Rather what matters is the doing itself. The typicality,
regularity and the very complacency of the action means that it can be fulfilling
without its significance becoming apparent to us. It is something we find ourselves
doing without necessarily knowing why or being able to see its significance. We
need not reflect on the significance of every action, and indeed to do so would put
a stop to many of our activities. Our actions are fulfilling in themselves without
them being seen by us to have any further intention or purpose. They are worth
doing for their own sake without any other justification. What is meaningful is
that they can be done, and without us having to think about them or seeing them
as significant in themselves.
As Michael Oakeshott (1991) has stated, many of the things we do are ends
in themselves. We have friendships for themselves and for no other reason, just
as we go fishing, take a walk, do a jigsaw or read a novel: these are all ends in
themselves. We have no ulterior motives and our actions are not means to an end.
Our friendships are not intended to secure anything other than the camaraderie of
the moment and our hobbies are pursued for their immediate enjoyment. There is
no particular purpose to the action: we are just living and using what is around us
to help us do so.
Often we will not notice what we are using. As Martin Heidegger (1962) shows
when he articulates the idea of things being ready to hand, we do not tend to see an
object as differentiated from us as we use it. The hammer becomes an extension
of us as we drive in the nail. It works with us and does so apparently without
appearing to be separate or distinct from us. Whilst it works with us, it is just
there, it operates as a part of us, it cannot be distinguished from us. Clearly such
an object has a significance for us but this significance is not made apparent to us.
It is only when the tool breaks or we lose the capacity to use it that we become
aware of it. The hammer then becomes unready to hand and we cannot but notice
it as an object that is distinct from us (Heidegger, 1962).
What this suggests is that in order to live as we do, we must be complacent. We
do not often test ourselves and we do not reflect on what we do. We feel secure and
safe in what we are and where we are. As such, we are able to absorb experiences
and to accommodate them as part of our ordinary world (King, 2004, 2005, 2008).
These two concepts – of complacency and absorption – are therefore important in
understanding how we are able to live without any sense of progress.
Like blandness, the notion of complacency is often seen as a negative.
A dictionary definition states that the term means extreme self-satisfaction
and smugness. It is where we are pleased with ourselves, self-righteous and
unconcerned with anything other than ourselves. These might not be seen as
virtues and so we can wonder why we might suggest they are important, and even
necessary, to us. Why would we want to see smugness and a lack of concern as
positives? But smugness and a lack of concern are traits noticed by others, and we
may not see ourselves as such. We may not be interested in the views of others and
how we are perceived. Instead we are more concerned with our own priorities and
with caring for those we are close to. And in doing this, we get a sense of a life
well led. Indeed, this is recognised in other cognates of complacency. The word
can also connote ideas of contentment, serenity and tranquil pleasure: it is where
we are calmly content.
The ability we have to pursue our own interests gives us a quiet purpose and
allows for a certain contentment. In other words, we can become absorbed in our
own world. Moreover, this sense of complacency – of being at peace with the
world – allows us to absorb elements from outside and to incorporate them into
our ordinary lives without necessarily feeling that we are changing. When we
absorb something this implies that we soak it up or assimilate it. It might mean
Complacent 79
that we consume the thing from outside, but also we might be extended by it. We
have taken in the force of the external object and have grown or changed as a
result. But because we have incorporated it, we see it as already part of us rather
than as a distinct addition. So the importance of the idea of absorption is that it
carries no sense of an expansion or extension of our sense of the ordinary: we are
like a sponge in the manner in which we can soak up material without appearing
to expand ourselves beyond our natural limits. What we absorb may affect us
temporarily but we are able to assimilate it using the strength and regularity of our
habits and experiences and our own ingrained way of seeing in order to retain our
composure and complacency.
We are able to retain a sense of balance, to maintain that blandness-detachment
that Francois Jullien refers to. We are not pushed to extremes of taste or action but
can keep a certain ambivalence, a detachment from commitment, and hold each
element together in a composed whole. Again we have used a term that might be
taken as a negative: to be ambivalent is to be indifferent and undecided. We cannot,
or do not, choose between options; we are of no opinion and we feel neither one
thing nor another. It is the point at which we feel two conflicting emotions, or hold
two conflicting opinions at the same time.
But this negative sense is similar to that which we discussed regarding
complacency. What appears to be negative from the outside, from the standpoint of
a person looking at us who does not understand us and seeks to view us according
to some objective criteria, might be entirely positive from an internal, subjective
point of view. Indeed, ambivalence is a necessary part of complacency, in that it
is the external appearance of our complacent self. When we are operating as our
ordinary selves, we will appear to be absorbed in our interests and ends, and this
means holding together a number of elements that form the habitual frame of our
lives. From the outside this will appear as a lack of commitment or as a lack of
decisiveness with regard to the world around us. We do not notice things in their
objectivity, as elements distinct from us, but we absorb them into the ongoing
habits and routines that make up our sense of the ordinary.
The opposite of complacency as I use it here is implacability. Much of the
world is unknowing of us. It is not part of us and does not accept us. Accordingly,
we cannot absorb this into our sense of the ordinary. There is much in the world
that is purely material and immune to our subjectivity. It does not react to us or
allow us to use it as we will, but rather it remains implacable in the face of our
presence. Most of the time this is because we cannot claim exclusive use of these
material objects. They belong to others and so are out of our control. But to be
complacent is to have this control and exclusive use. This means that we can use
the implacability of objects – the four walls of our dwelling with its locks and
shutters – to hide behind. Our complacency masks the implacability of the world,
or rather it turns it outwards and away from us and so allows us to use it against
others. The implacability of our material objects operates on others and so protects
and shields us from the unpredictable outside world (King, 2008).
It may well be that our sense of complacency is an illusion. But if so, it is a very
useful and powerful illusion. It exists because we believe in it, or rather because
that is how we act. We can be complacent and can be so without a moment’s
thought. There are doubtless occasions when this illusion fails us and we are
forced to face the implacability of the material world as something distinct from
ourselves. But we try hard to avoid this and we do so by coming to terms with what
is around us and by getting to know it. In others words, it is through acceptance of
the world that we start to diminish its implacability. It is through acceptance that
we start to bring the world to us and appreciate the wholeness of which we are
part. This understanding is at the very heart of the antimodern: to be antimodern is
to reject progress and this means that we accept the world as it is and our place in
it. Our task therefore is to elucidate this idea of acceptance and, in so doing, fully
appreciate the antimodern condition.
Chapter 6
Acceptance
What is acceptance? What does it mean to be accepting rather than to aspire? What
would it mean to eschew progress and just take life as it comes?
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film Woman of the Dunes (1964) is about a woman who
cannot face leaving a place and about a man who comes to accept that same place
after he is forced to live in it. The man wishes for nothing but escape, whilst for
the woman no other place is tenable. Yet at the end of the film it is the woman who
apparently leaves and the man who stays. Woman of the Dunes shows the power
of constraint. For the woman, ideas of freedom and choice do not seem to be
particularly important at all. Her priority is one of maintaining her dwelling and its
immediate environs as a place to live, to maintain her life as tenable, even though
this involves continual back-breaking toil and appears to an outsider as completely
senseless. The man’s priority, as a modern educated city dweller, is to get back to
the city, his job, his apartment and his responsibilities.
The man portrayed in the film is a teacher using his holiday to collect insects in
the dunes on the coast. We see him roaming the dunes and collecting specimens,
the very model of the modern rationalist. On one of his searches he meets a
villager and converses with him briefly. He falls asleep and we see him dream
about a woman who appears estranged from him. Perhaps it is his wife, who has
left him, or a former lover. When he awakes, the same villager he met earlier
tells him that he has missed his last bus back to the city. However, the villager
says he can find him a place to stay. The man goes along with this plan, even
when it means staying in a widow’s shack at the bottom of a deep pit in the sand
into which he has to descend using a rope ladder. The young widow lives alone
in the pit, sleeping in the day and spending the night shovelling sand out of the
pit, from where it is carted away by other villagers. She has to do this to stop the
sand encroaching, saying that if her house disappears, the next one in the village
will then be endangered. She tells the man that her husband and young child were
buried in a sand slide, but that she feels she still has to carry on living in this place.
The man is patronising about her life and her opinions: when she tells him that
the sand causes things to rot, he scoffs. However, he accepts her hospitality and
spends the night there.
In the morning the man awakes to find no rope ladder and no one to pull him up.
He tries to climb the slopes of the pit but slides down, and he comes to understand
that he is not a guest but a prisoner, trapped there to help the widow who is
struggling to keep the sand at bay on her own. He has in effect been assigned by
the villagers to help her, and so he finds that he has to stay. The film, then, is about
his attempts at escape, his resentment, but then his acceptance of his situation, his
anger turning to resignation and then how he accommodates himself to the place.
The film also charts the changing relationship between the woman and the man,
which is highly charged erotically but also full of misunderstanding and deceit,
particularly on the part of the man. Yet by the end of the film, even when a rope
ladder is left dangling into the pit and he climbs it and walks on the dunes again,
he comes back down and stays. And he does this, even though the woman leaves.
There is an ambiguity here, in that the woman is taken off to see a doctor when
she miscarries and the last we see of her is when she is being winched out of the
pit. We are not told whether she returns, but are left to draw our own conclusions.
The film ends with a legal notice tidying up the man’s affairs now that he has been
missing for seven years. Clearly he has stayed in the pit.
During the course of the film the man comes to accept the worldview of the
woman. At the end, when he climbs out of the pit, we see him looking across the
dunes and out to sea at the distant horizon, and it is as if at this moment he comes
to see that the much smaller horizon of the shack in the pit is actually all that he
wants. He is no longer a rational man, a scientist searching for the new discovery,
but has come to accept that his horizon is and should be limited, and he seems to
find a kind of happiness in this acceptance.
The woman sees her shack in the bottom of the pit as a place that she cannot
possibly leave: it is home and therefore a place to be preserved at all costs, and
she insists on this, even though she has lost her husband and child to the sand. Her
horizon is circumscribed by the walls of the pit around her, but that is how her
world is. It is not something to fight against or seek to change. She tells the man
that many young people have left the village for the city, but she has no yearning
for this. When the man asks her if she lives to shovel sand or shovels sand to live,
she does not answer, as if this is incomprehensible or meant as a joke.
We can, of course, see the woman as being naïve: her narrow horizon means
that she cannot understand what is beyond the sand dunes. But we can also see
Acceptance 83
her as being so attached to her hut in the sand that there is no purpose in doing
anything else: where would she go, and what else would she do? She knows
little other than life in the village; it is normal and that is how life is. For her,
home is to be preserved at all costs, and the fact that this involves backbreaking,
Sisyphean, seemingly pointless work is an irrelevance. But we should not ignore
the attachment merely because we see the woman as naïve. Perhaps we can only
become so attached if we are to an extent naïve ourselves. Attachment is about
putting our trust in one place, about investing all our emotional intensity in it, and
this involves a degree of naivety, a simplicity involving acceptance of things at face
value rather than speculating on hypotheticals. We see this in her incomprehension
in response to the man’s jibe about why she is shovelling sand. But it is also there
in her inability to consider escaping, and the plaintive and vulnerable look she
wears when she is lifted out of the pit at the end of the film.
The film is about the limits of freedom, and how, like the woman, we can come
to accept what we have. We do this because it is all that we know, or all that we can
have, and because we have neither the choice nor the ability to change these things.
The woman has to shovel sand, she has to take precautions against its incursion
and, more particularly, she has to stay where she is because that is her home. She
accepts this because that is how she has always lived. The man, however, only
comes to accept where he is and why he is there over time, as he gets used to the
life and what it comes to mean to him. We see his priorities changing from those
of his city life, and we realise at the end of the film, when he is declared missing
after seven years away, that he will never leave, and that he has now found home.
He is no longer searching for anything: he stops being the rational collector and
instead turns his mind to the practical matters of subsistence.
He has come to this acceptance of place simply through being there. This
might be partly due to inertia: you get used to what you have, and if there are
no options, then why contemplate change? But we feel that there is more to the
man’s transformation than this, and this is shown when he chooses not to escape.
It is no longer that he cannot escape, but that he does not want to any more: he
would now have to give up more than he would gain. He now takes what he has as
ordinary and commonplace (King, 2005). His life is now built on regular routines
and habits, and he has grown used to this, seeing it now as normal and worth
devoting his life to because of what he has already put into it. But he can also see
a future for himself there, as we see when he plans a water capture and irrigation
scheme for the village. This may be impractical, but it keeps him there and gives
him some sense of purpose. This, for him, is the equivalent of shovelling sand,
and we might now ask whether he collects water to live, or lives to collect water.
At the start of the film he dreams of the estranged woman, and we can surmise
that he might be, or had been, in a relationship. He is certainly employed and had
responsibilities. Yet despite his claims about being part of the modern world, and
a person who will be missed, no one comes to look for him. The modern world
has moved on without him. We get a sense of failure, of something unfulfilled, and
this is emphasised by his searching in the dunes for insects. He is looking for a
new species so that he can get his own entry in an encyclopaedia. We feel, though,
that he is searching for more than insects and what he perhaps needs is regularity,
stasis and a place where there is little or no change. This may lead him to a life
of drudgery, one in which he is hemmed in by a dangerous environment, but he
seems now to be at peace.
The sand is perhaps one of the most implacable of environments that we
can imagine. It is harsh and presents a constant threat, which the villagers must
continually guard against. Their life is essentially one of shovelling sand, eating
and sleeping. To stop shovelling is to accept the end of their community and there
can be no negotiation about this. The sand will find its way into their dwellings and
will fill up the pits if they allow it to. The villagers have no option but to accept the
implacability of their environment. Like the man, we can try to climb these dunes
but we will slide down again, bringing ever more sand down on top of us. But this
is both a natural relation with the environment and an inevitable one – and this
inevitability is crucial to an acceptance of our place. Once we accept that this is
how the environment is, we then see it as less fearsome and that it is possible for
us to live there. We must still respect it, but we can live within it. It may not be as
comfortable as other places, nor can we ever take it for granted, yet it can, after a
fashion, be accommodating. The villagers can live there as long as they take the
necessary precautions and work to keep the sand at bay and, despite the hazards and
the dangers, a sense of normality can come with this understanding of the nature
of the environment. This is not, we are led to believe, a new community, but one
that is now well adapted to its environment. We see this after the man escapes but
becomes lost in the dunes and needs to be rescued from quicksand. The villagers
know how to undertake such a rescue: they have developed the right equipment
and have a confidence that comes from living constantly in this environment.
The woman shows her understanding of the sand in the way she protects the
dwelling and its contents; in the way she sleeps under an umbrella or with a cloth
over her face, and sleeps naked so that the sand does not cause a rash; and in her
Acceptance 85
statement that the sand rots things. This latter knowledge runs against conventional
wisdom and can only be gained from direct experience. The man scoffs at this
view – the sand is absolutely dry and so how can it rot things? The woman’s
expression in the face of the man’s scoffing is one of quiet certainty: she knows
that she is right – she has seen things rotted away by the sand – and therefore sees
no point in arguing or seeking to persuade the man. He will find out soon enough
for himself, and indeed we soon see him taking the same precautions and acting
to minimise the sand’s ingress into the shack. He too must accept the environment
as it is in this place.
But this acceptance, as it were, is not reciprocated. The sand remains implacably
neutral towards the villagers: they can come to terms with it, learn its ways and
how to manage their place in it, but the sand only accepts them on its terms. They
can keep it at bay only with constant attention and care. They cannot ignore it or
take it for granted as they might a more conventional environment. And no matter
what precautions they may take, this will not prevent the effects of a sand slide, a
storm, or the slow, steady and inevitable ingress of the sand.
This returns us to the question of just why anyone would choose to stay there.
If the environment is so dangerous and if tragedies like the death of the woman’s
husband and child are inevitable, why do the villagers remain? But in trying to
answer that question we come up against the circularity of this discussion, and
how we can only go so far with our speculations. The villagers stay because they
must, because they know no other life; they do not know what is outside or what
it might mean to leave or indeed whether they would be capable of dealing with
a different environment. But they know what they have now and what it means
to stay there. This is not a proper answer to the question, as we see from the
man’s scepticism at the start of the film. He knows that an alternative is possible
because he has lived it. He sees no necessity for the villagers to stay, no purpose in
their drudgery. Yet in the end he chooses to stay there with them and confines his
horizon to the top of the pit in the sand.
Perhaps what we ought to suggest is that the man stays because he can rather
than because he must. He realises that he can live there. He now knows what it
takes, what is involved and is now prepared to accept it. Being able to stay is not
just about the physical conditions of a place, but about accommodating ourselves
to a particular place, about finding how it can be lived in. In doing this, we find
that it is sustainable, a place that can hold us, where we can see our future, and this
future involves staying there. In short, it is where we feel we belong.
What matters is a realisation on the part of the man that he is now free, although
not in an absolute sense of complete licence to do as he pleases. He is not free in
any modern sense. He is now free in the sense that he lives within an order that he
can both understand and help to maintain, as we see at the end of the film when
he lays out his plans for an irrigation system. He says that he will tell the village
elders about his scheme, and that he can escape later. And we know that he never
will, that he is there for good: why develop a long-term scheme to irrigate a village
surrounded by sand if you intend to leave it?
What we are not told is whether the woman returns. Considering that she was
to have his child and there is a strong physical attraction between them, this is odd:
we might have expected the woman to return for the woman thus validating his
decision to stay. Indeed, would the man stay there without her? We might suggest
that this ambiguity about the woman’s return is there to avoid adulterating the
director’s vision of the man’s transformation into accepting the place: according
to this view, the film is intended to be about coming to terms with a place, not
getting used to another person. Yet if this is the case, what does it say about the
role of the woman in the film? Is she merely a cipher, a caricature that helps to
put forward a particular view, and is the film is really ‘about’ the man, despite its
title? But if this is so, how should we take her statements about attachment and her
inscrutability in the face of the man’s early scepticism? Is she herself intended as
an example of the implacability of the environment, of the sheer unavoidability of
what is necessary for survival in this place? But this emptying out of the woman’s
character would seem to take no account of the erotic quality of the film and the
developing relationship between the couple. Before the woman leaves, we see
several scenes that show them as a couple sharing their domestic life. They have
their allotted tasks and routines, and treat each other with an easy familiarity when
in each other’s company, which is markedly different from the eroticism of the
early part of the film. They have accepted each other and so seem to be partners,
talking about the long term and bickering over trifles.
Yet even though this is the case, the man does not come to accept the wisdom
of the woman on the basis of the strength of her arguments or her powers of
persuasion. Rather he learns through experience and example that they are true. It
is through his own experiences that he comes to understand that what she told him
at their first meeting is correct. He comes to accept things not because he is told
that he should, but because he sees that is how his world now is. His city arrogance
has been ‘sanded down’ by the persistence of the environment and the woman’s
stoical acceptance of it. Might we not see the woman’s position as the banal, but
Acceptance 87
quite fundamental, point that ‘life goes on’? She represents continuity and doing
what is necessary to ensure that life can continue, bringing the environment and
dwellers together as closely and as purposefully as possible.
The woman, as it were, teaches the man, offering a lesson to someone who
is modern and who, because of his modernity, is isolated from others. The man
uses the dunes as a laboratory, as a place to find things, to explore, so that he
can understand how the world is. He is also concerned to get his name in an
encyclopaedia for his discovery of a new species. He wants to be recognised for
his efforts rather than seeing them as sufficient unto themselves: he is not living to
collect, but collecting for recognition and status. This sense of modernity, of trying
to find things out, of understanding and controlling the world, and being seen to
do it, is opposed to the woman’s view of taking the world as it is, of accepting the
environment she is in and coming to some accommodation with it.
After the woman’s instruction, the man deliberately limits himself. He gives
up modern comforts and amenities in order to keep something he now has. Or
perhaps it is truer to say that he no longer recognises their loss. That he can do
this is not because the dwelling in the pit is better than any other, but because he
has become to see it as normal: it is home and he can accept it as it is rather than
yearning for something else beyond his reach which only appears in his dreams.
This does not mean, however, that there is a necessary virtue in all things basic
or in struggle, or in placing bare necessity above high standards of amenity. The
film is about finding out both what is appropriate and what is enough. This is
something that can only decided empirically, through experience and on the basis
of the man’s relation to a specific place.
What the film shows is how we move from implacability to acceptance, from
being in an apparently unyielding environment to coming to an accommodation
with it. When the man first stays there, the environment shows itself in its full
implacability. It is harsh unyielding and unforgiving. It is hostile and to live there
seems to him a joke. But once forced to remain there, he comes to accept the
environment and the possibilities that it offers. This possibility does not involve
opening up in the sense of a broadening of the horizon. Instead it involves an
opening up to the nature of the environment and how he can be there and learn
what it takes to find accommodation with it. This is partly a relationship with the
sand, but also with the woman, in the sense of the man accepting the place-wisdom
of the woman.
What the woman seeks to do above all – what her accommodation involves – is
to maintain, to keep, her place. Her role, as she sees it, is to ensure that her place
remains, that it is passed on. She is determined that the footprint of her community
will not be eradicated from the sand, despite the precariousness of this endeavour,
of making anything last in this shifting environment. I take this as a key message
of the film: that we have a responsibility to find, and then to take care of, our place
and to make sure that we do not lose it. We need to maintain the roots we have
made and which have been established for us by past generations. And the more
fragile these roots are, the harder we have to work to preserve them. This idea
of place keeping is a way of linking the past with the present and the future. We
should preserve what has been handed down to us and, in turn, forward it on to
those who will follow us. This creates a link to place which is something broader
than just a piece of land: the woman is concerned to preserve a pattern of life, a
community and a history.
Can we say that the man is a better person at the end of the film than at the
start? And if he is, what is the allegory here? I would suggest that if being at
peace with the world is a virtue, then the man is a better person. He has found
a place where he belongs. But more broadly, as an allegory, we should read the
man’s transformation as a recognition of the need for limits in how we live. The
man thought he was free in the modern world and that he was pursuing a rational
and fulfilling path. Yet he comes to see both his freedom and his searching as
equally empty, and he arrives at this conclusion by becoming hemmed in, by being
trapped in an apparently hostile and alien environment. He comes to find that
human purposes are close to us and do not involve treks into the unknown, and it
is only through limits, through a narrow horizon, that he comes to see this.
Teshigahara’s film tells us what acceptance means and why it is important. His
vision is not of perfection or even of possibility. Instead it deals with how we come
an accommodation with the world and learn that we now have enough. It shows
us, albeit it in a rather allusive manner, what it might mean to be at peace with the
world and to accept that we are part of it rather than beings who fight to control and
consume. In the discussion that follows I wish to fill out these ideas and show just
how important it is that we come to some accommodation and are able to accept
our place. This involves a discussion in this chapter of the concepts of acceptance
and accommodation. I then turn to the idea of limits and how acceptance means
that we are able to see when we have enough and that aspiration and striving are
damaging for us. Taken together, these concepts demonstrate what the antimodern
condition involves and so will allow us to attempt some sort of overview in the final
chapter. The discussion in this chapter focuses on film as a means of elucidating the
key concepts of the antimodern condition. This most modern of art forms is also
Acceptance 89
the one most able to show us the foibles of the modern world and open up cracks
that allow us to glimpse an alternative antimodern world. But our method also
reiterates an important aspect of the antimodern, that despite any positive qualities
it might hold, it is essentially a critique of the modern. We are antimodern because
we are struggling to escape from the modern. We are watching the modern, like
an audience in a cinema. We are engaged with it, but we are also trying to remain,
as it were, separate. We are observers sitting outside the frame of the modern. We
know what the modern is and we know we cannot really avoid it, yet we can see
ourselves as watchers of a strange set of illusions. The illusion of cinema therefore
mirrors the distance we seek from the modern.
II
The appropriateness of film as a medium for discussing these issues is such that
I wish to look, albeit rather more briefly, at another example. Like Teshigahara’s
Woman of the Dunes, this too is a product of the 1960s, but it could not be more
different in tone and style. Peter Hammond’s film Spring and Port Wine (1969),
is a gentle comedy set in a northern English industrial town in the late 1960s. The
story centres on a family of middle-aged parents and four grown-up children. The
father is at the centre of the home as the source of authority and a figure to be both
mocked and feared in equal measure for his rigour and sense of certainty. This
certainty oppresses the children, making them feel diminished and unable to assert
themselves as they would like. On a Friday they hand over their earnings and the
father checks his wife’s housekeeping accounts.
Yet we sense that each person is still centred within the home. Each has a role,
a place or purpose that he or she fulfils, like spokes around the hub of the father.
They fit within a routine that establishes and ultimately satisfies them (as we see
when none of the children leaves home, despite their apparent desire to do so).
They may want to leave, but there is no sense that this is really a serious intention.
In one scene, the two boys pack their belongings, put on their coats and prepare
to leave. But when they are asked where they intend to go, it becomes clear that
this had not even occurred to them. The two daughters also make plans to leave.
The youngest daughter, finding her father intolerable after a dispute over a kipper
she refuses to eat (her queasiness is due to her being pregnant), goes to stay with a
workmate, but she soon returns disapproving of that family’s habits. Being away
for only a short time makes her realise what ties her to her own home. The elder
daughter is planning to marry and goes to look at a house with her fiancé. But even
this new potential home is shown as anonymous and uninviting with the furniture
covered with sheets. It too lacks the feeling of specificity, the particularity that
makes somewhere home.
What becomes apparent as the story develops is that regularity is the source
of both comfort and resentment. The father sees home as a place of love, yet he
offers no overt show of affection to his children. For him, love is about instruction,
discipline and control, over both himself and others. So he is stern and unyielding
to his children, as in the case of the kipper which he orders to be put in front of
his daughter until she eats it: he feels his daughter should be grateful for what her
mother has cooked and that she should learn not to waste good food. He describes
raising children as a battle between them and their parents, in which the aim is
to control the desires and wishes of the young that would lead them into trouble.
The mother sits in between, listening sympathetically to both sides, defending the
children when she can, as she sees this is the best way for the family to survive
and thrive.
But when all this starts to fall apart – the children threatening to leave or
actually (for a time) leaving, and being helped by the mother who has raised the
money by pawning the father’s new coat – the father finally tells his wife why he
takes this attitude to family life. His attitude to raising children is in reaction to his
own childhood, when his dissolute parents struggled to pay the rent and maintain
stability. He is determined to be the very opposite of his feckless parents. This of
course is the great cliché at the centre of the film – that we act against how our
parents behaved. His children react against his apparent rigidity: they smoke in
the house; his daughter falls pregnant; they wish to leave precisely because he
sets such great store by being together. Yet he has become such a martinet to his
children because of his parents’ dissolute behaviour.
We can see that the film is about the resolution of this turning against parental
control: it is about finding the medium between extremes of control and licence and
demonstrates that parenthood is about finding a compromise between sympathetic
intelligences, whereby we accommodate the differences because of what binds us.
The youngest daughter, as we have seen, readily returns to the family home when
she sees how others live: as she says, ‘They are not like us, are they, Mum?’ The
film is concerned with what is thick between us and how we can establish some
individual space without breaching that connection. The thickness of blood can
clog and coagulate and prevent us from carrying out our own movements. And so
Acceptance 91
we might yearn for something that is thinner and clearer in which to swim. But we
still need this medium: thick or thin, we cannot survive without it.
What this shows is the need for accommodation, for the manner in which
we can and do make allowances for those we know and love, and we do so
because of what we share. This is a thoroughly illogical and circular process,
in which the accommodation becomes dependent on love, and love dependent
on the accommodation. So we see that the mother is desperate to show she can
manage the housekeeping, and thus the ‘window cleaner’ becomes a balancing
item if she cannot account for where the money has gone, and she borrows from
the children to ‘keep it right’. Yet we find at the end of the film that her husband
has known all along that she had been ‘fiddling’ the accounts (not of course for
her benefit, but out of financial incompetence and fear). He has pretended to
accept her excuses and reasoning to save her face and to keep things as they are.
He is therefore, despite his rigour and principles, capable of accommodation,
and so his bending and acceptance of his children as they are at the end of the
film, is not really such a step for him. His accommodation is rather to admit his
fear and so lose it, and to be able to express those doubts and anxieties that have
driven him for so long; what he finally has to admit is that his principles do not
rest on certainty but on doubt.
Within families and relationships we pretend and we hope that we are not
found out. But much of this pretence can only be maintained by the active
complicity of those we are trying to deceive. They let us get away with it to
preserve the peace and to maintain the dignity of the deceiver. Or they let us
carry on as the martinet because this is what they wish to push against. It is a
form of paradoxical but mutual compatibility, sometimes based on fear of the
consequences, perhaps of change or of losing someone, in the knowledge of the
irreversibility of time and indeed of knowledge, and because we love that person
and do not wish to bruise their dignity or insult them. We respect them so much
we want them to continue in a manner that does not diminish them, even if this
might cause us stress and worry.
Love, then, is about acceptance and accommodation, not just in the sense of
being together, but of not rubbing against each other. We live together and, in doing
so, we give something up to achieve a common end. It is a mutual acquiescence,
which at its best becomes a single thread. Perhaps more commonly we believe we
have enough to keep us together and wish to preserve it for each other. The crucial
element in all this, as shown in Spring and Port Wine, is not just where we live,
but how and with whom.
This film also demonstrates that rules and established patterns do not prevent
change; they merely limit it, channel it and direct it along particular ways.
They provide us with a set of limits within which we must seek some form of
accommodation. There will be conflicts, and occasions when we rub up against the
boundaries, or indeed seek to push them over. Sometimes we will indeed succeed
– the wheel will leave the rut, we might be uprooted, or a cutting might be taken
and replanted to form something new. Yet when this occurs, what we soon see is
the formation of new ruts and the need for new roots, for without these we cannot
be accommodated.
We can accept certain people and the situations they create because we
know them and love them. We can be hurt by them and feel misunderstood and
unappreciated. These are feelings that we might have as children in the face of
apparently unsympathetic parents, but also, as parents ourselves, when we feel
our children do not appreciate the sacrifices we have made and the sheer time
and effort devoted to nurturing and protecting them. Yet this does not diminish
the bonds between parent and child: the apparent lack of appreciation does not
prevent further sacrifice without question, nor does the apparent lack of sympathy
prevent us from constantly turning to our parents for succour. What we have here
is a practical obligation, which may be unspoken but is also unquestioned. We are
tied in and we know we are, and we wish to be, and all this operates at the level of
ordinary experience. We accept these ties and so accommodate ourselves to others.
III
Acceptance is about coming to terms with what we have. It is where we are

prepared to take the terms we are offered. It is the condition in which we take
the world as it is. This is not to deny any possibility of change, but rather to see
that the purpose of life is not change. Change occurs, but it is not an end in itself
and so it should not be worshipped. Change occurs, and it may be welcome, but
it frequently is not, and so we should not seek it or see readiness to change as a
virtue. Instead, we should see acceptance as the superior state, in that it allows
us to find our place in the world. Instead of searching, we can recognise what we
already have: what we dream for is often just under our feet.
Acceptance is a positive act. We have to actually do something to accept. We
consent to receive something; we give an affirmative answer and make something
welcome. Thus to accept is not to turn our backs on anything but rather to reach
Acceptance 93
out and connect ourselves to other people and elements in the world. It is therefore
a tolerant view in that we find something agreeable and actively receive it. Of
course there may be some sense of resignation. We may have to accept second
best or make concessions and so acquiesce to something when we might otherwise
choose not to. We can imagine ourselves in situations of duress in which we are
forced to submit and so give an appearance of acceptance.
It may be difficult to tell from the outside when one accepts a situation or
merely becomes resigned to it, but there is a danger of this dichotomy being
based on a false premise. The significance of acceptance, and the need to
accommodate, is precisely that our options are limited and that we do not have a
free choice. We are faced with an implacable world that presents us with a fixed
number of opportunities, and some, or even all, of these might not be optimal.
We may have to accept a situation that does not match with our aspirations or
with the dictates of modernity. But then this is entirely the point: the antimodern
condition is one in which we come to see that there are limits and that we must
accept them. We can seek to reject them and to push against these limits, but we
do so without being fully aware of the costs and consequences of such actions.
Or we can accept the world as it with relish. We can make a positive choice and
come to terms with how the world is and accept our place and so accommodate
ourselves to what is around us.
Accordingly, acceptance shows an appreciation, an understanding, of our
environment and our place in it. We know what we have; we know where we are;
and perhaps we even know why we are there. We know what is good about our
world, and how we can use it in an accommodating manner. So to accept means
that we find meaning in the world. We know our place and we feel that our place
knows us: it is this mutuality that makes a place ‘mine’. We feel that we fit well
together and we can appreciate each other. Most environments are not hostile like
sand dunes but are rather better at accommodating us. The implacability of the
environment is normally hidden within a more gentle landscape.
Acceptance means that we can be comfortable with our position. We adopt
a complacent relationship with the things around us within our place. Once we
accept, we do not have to think about where we are. The meaning we derive
from our engagement with the world comes through our use of things. We do
not really have to think about what we are doing. What allows us to do this is
familiarity, and this links us back to the discussion at the start of the book where
we referred to Michael Oakeshott’s notion of conservatism and how it depends
on the desire to retain the familiar (Oakeshott, 1991). Oakeshott states that the
conservative prefers the familiar to the unknown and the achievable to the utopian.
This dependence on familiarity is in no way sentimental. It is not a wistful or
nostalgic plea for a lost world but rather a hard-headed acknowledgement of the
verities of being in place. This view of the world is based on experience and is
grounded in the lessons of the past. It is the successes, as well as the knocks and
grazes, of the past that steer us towards the familiar and away from the utopian.
To be antimodern is to accept the past as the guide for the present and the future.
We accept the world as it is because we know we can live well within it.
Acceptance, as I have described it here, can be seen as the opposite of
striving or aspiring. Instead of always looking to climb the next step of the
proverbial ladder or to purchase the next desired object, we have come to terms
with what we have and so we stop looking for something new. We refuse to see
change, flux and transgression – all those things that are taken as emblematic of
the modern – as the normal way of the world. In contrast to the modern view
we choose to see stability and stasis as the norm. We assume that things will
stay as there are. We take things around us as being in their normal condition
and that they will persist as they are. We do this because it has happened again
and again in the past: this is the way of the world as we perceive it. As such,
we can take this grounding, this foundation, for granted and go out into the
world to fulfil our ends without worrying that everything needs continually to be
remade. We absorb an understanding of our place and act as we do, albeit often
unconsciously, simply because this is how things are. We know our limits and
have come to terms with them, and with this sense of limits comes a maturity
and an appreciation of what is possible and realistic in our lives. We are aware
of what we can and cannot do, what is reasonable to attempt and what we should
not try to do. We do not reach beyond ourselves.
It may be said that acceptance carries with it a number of dangers. Indeed some
may argue that it is based on a delusion. If we are deluded, then our acceptance
may be flawed and we might settle for something we need not have done. If we
have insufficient information or our beliefs are misguided then we might end up
by misinterpreting what is available to us and what we might expect. It may also
be argued that accepting the status quo serves only to perpetuate inequality and
privilege. It means that existing social arrangements remain and only those that
currently benefit us are safeguarded. So it may be argued that acceptance actually
only suits the interests of a dominant group. In other words, what if acceptance is
nothing more than an example of false consciousness?
Acceptance 95
An allied point is that acceptance seems to mean that there can be no progress,
no improvement and no chance of a better life. Things may get better, but only
by accident rather than design. We may feel we are apparently consigned to our
current state, with the only possibility being that things may get worse. This might
not matter if we are currently comfortable and expect to remain so, but if we lack
resources to ensure a comfortable life, then why should we accept our situation
and rule out the hope of anything better?
There is also a more pragmatic objection that might be made to our argument.
While we may fail with our strivings in terms of not getting to where we aspire
to, we may still end up in a better place than where we started. We may achieve
some partial success and it might be judged that the aspiration was worth pursuing.
These are all apparently worthy arguments, but we can also readily answer
them. First, it may well be that we are deluded in our beliefs and knowledge
regarding our current situation leading us to accept it on false premises. But this
criticism is equally likely to apply to those who encourage us to aspire. Why
are we more likely to be deluded because we choose the status quo rather than
some vision of the future? Surely we are more likely to be more fully aware of
our current circumstances while remaining rather more vague regarding a future
that is based on assumptions and hypotheticals. Second, acceptance might be
seen to ingrain existing inequalities, but if our current situation has arisen due to
changes in the past what guarantee do we have that future changes will be any
better? Again, we might argue it is better to accept what we know now rather
than risking the inevitable unintended consequences of change in the future.
Third, there may be vested interests who seek to benefit from the call for us to
accept our lot, but then we also need to ask who is calling for change: how do
we know that the change they are seeking is not just in their sectional interest?
Why should we assume that vested interests only operate in the present and not
with regard to the future?
The call for change often comes not from those at the bottom, but from
those who are already comfortable and who have the leisure to speculate on
the future. It is often a progressive elite – politicians, media commentators,
academics etc. – who pursue change rather than those who are portrayed as
suffering from the current dispensation. This elite can more readily afford to
bear the costs of failure: they have the means to deal with rapid change while
the poorest have not. So change for the progressive elite is less consequential
while the poorest cannot afford the risk involved. Joyce Appleby (2010) argues
that what held up capitalist development in its early stages was not elites
with vested interests but rather the fear of change on the part of the poorest,
who believed that any change would make them worse off. Any change, they
reasonably feared, would affect them grievously, as they knew they did not
have the means or the latitude to escape its effects.
The problem with modernity is precisely that it takes striving, change, flux
and transgression as the norm. This, we are told, is how life is and we should
positively relish the challenge of the unknown. But, as we have seen, modernity
often tends to be reductive and sees change and flux as ends in themselves:
progress is taken as a good thing by definition, rather than any consideration
being given to what we are progressing towards and why. Modernity does not
permit simple acceptance of the status quo: this is simply not presented as an
option. Modernity is at war with the ordinary, with the common acceptance of
the world. Modernity cannot accept the world as it is, but seeks to impose a
speculative vision on the world and to force it to bend to that vision. Modernity
therefore forbids us to accept our place. It obliges us see stasis and complacency
as faults and as signs of failure rather than as the necessary parts of a sustainable
existence within the world.
Most people, we might suggest, simply wish to get on with their lives. Unlike
intellectual elites, they do not wish to impose their principles on others. Most
of us are concerned only with ourselves and our own. We do not seek a wider
influence that enables us to dictate to others. We do not accept that others know
better than we do or that they have our best interests at heart. Why should they
presume to know what is better for us? They do not know us; they are not aware
of how we live; and so we rightly fear that they might impose their vision of the
world on us.
Finally, we might indeed argue that partial success is better than no success, but
on what basis can we argue this? If we cannot guarantee a particular outcome, then
how can we know whether we will meet with any improvement at all? Suggesting
that we might be partially successful does not lessen the risk we might fail. Failure
of any sort, even if it be partial, might have a negative psychological effect. But if
we never strive, we cannot be disappointed by failure.
Acceptance is based on the belief that the place we are now is best for us. We
may well be aware that it is not ideal or perfect, that things could conceivably, in
an ideal world, be better than they currently are. But we may also believe that the
risks outweigh the potential advantages. Accordingly, we yield up some, or even
all, of our ambitions and we are prepared to bear the consequences. We submit
to what is possible, and what allows us to do this is the knowledge that what we
Acceptance 97
have is familiar. We know it well and it knows us. We are with those we love
and we know that by staying where we are, we can remain with them. There are
emotional and psychological links that would be broken by change, by putting
our aspirations above the immediate needs of those close to us, and we are not
prepared to pay that price.
Of course to accept is not to stop living. It is rather where we put an emphasis
on maintenance rather than creation. We are keeping certain things going: those
things that we know work, that have a proven utility, that contain significant
meanings for us. This is instead of the speculative and as-yet-unknown forms
that might emerge from creation. As we saw in Woman of the Dunes, we are not
stopping, but keeping.
But we should not try to force this view of acceptance onto others. All we are
seeking to limit is ourselves. Acceptance can only come from within and only then
can it express itself outwards, and in that sense it must come voluntarily. We must
not presume that all others want this sense of being in and with place. We should
not try to prevent others from striving or aspiring, nor should we actively contest
with those that do. What we should seek to do, however, is to show that striving
and aspiration is not the only way, or even a particularly good way, to live, and
should not be taken as normal and the template used to judge others. We should not
take it as the default position and so be critical of those who do not strive and who
can accept what they have. What we can do, however, is offer further argument for
putting limits on ourselves and accepting our lot.
IV
As we have stated, acceptance is about coming to terms with how we must live. It is
about how we accommodate ourselves to those around us and to our environment.
The man, at the end of Woman of the Dunes, could say ‘This place is mine’, just as
the woman could. Another way of describing this situation is to say that the man
has found what is positive in that place. He is able to understand it and to make
use of it. He no longer seeks to fight against it or to escape, and instead he wishes
to stay. There is a peace about the man because he has learnt to dwell. The woman
and the place itself have worked their therapy on him, easing his anxiety so that
he is no longer searching for anything that cannot be found where he now is. The
family in Spring and Port Wine have come to an accommodation of their apparently
differing interests and have found what really binds them together. It might have
been there all the time, but now they can all see it. They can now recognise and
accept what they are. Both cases, we can suggest, involve the positive acceptance
of limits. But what might it mean to do this and why is it positive?
Pierre Hadot (1995, 2002) has argued for a return to philosophy as it was
perceived and practised by the ancients. Instead of it being the preserve of
professional philosophers with academic qualifications and positions at universities,
philosophy, according to Hadot (1995), is a way of life. Following the Greeks, he
sees philosophy as a non-professional, life-questioning and life-changing exercise.
It is an examination of how we can and should live. Philosophy can present us
with a means for living through the development of a set of principles or dogmas
– what might be called spiritual exercises – by which we can run our lives. Hadot
is particularly critical of thinkers who divorce what they say from what they do,
be they Marxists who own their own property and live in bourgeois family groups,
or environmentalists who drive cars. He feels that ancient philosophers would
find this behaviour of divorcing argument and practice as both incredible and
hypocritical.
Hadot’s argument – that philosophy is a way of life and not just an academic
exercise – is one that is particularly amenable to the discussion on acceptance.
But it also connects with another metaphor used to discuss ancient philosophy
developed by Martha Nussbaum (1994). This is the idea of philosophy as
therapy, as a practical means of assuaging the maladies of the soul. Philosophy,
as practised by Epicureans, Sceptics and Stoics, was about ensuring that
individuals were healthy in both body and soul. So Nussbaum, too, argues that
philosophy is about helping us to live well. Both Hadot and Nussbaum note that
the spiritual exercises of the ancient philosophers were based on a concern for
the here and now, for how we live in the present. If we were to live well now,
this would stand us in good stead for the future. So I want to suggest that what
ancient philosophers were concerned with was, amongst other things, how we
come to accept our place in the world.
I believe that we should be concerned to understand the notion of enough:
of what constitutes a sufficiency for us. The idea of what is enough is not
simply a question of reductionism, of levelling up or down to some externally
determined point, but of differentiating between those parts of our lives that are
vital and necessary and those which are the veneer, the dressing. We must come
to understand that a concern solely for the veneer may be destructive to the base.
The basis for the idea of enough is found in the few remaining words of the
Greek philosopher, Epicurus (ca. 341–271 BC). Despite his later reputation, as
Acceptance 99
evidenced by the use of the term ‘Epicureanism’ to denote a devotion to sensual

pleasure and the good things in life, Epicurus’s writings are actually concerned
with how one can reduce pain and increase pleasure, and so lead a life that is
untroubled by anxieties and unfounded desires. He states that:
He who understands the limits of life knows how easy it is to remove the pain
that results from want and to make one’s whole life complete. As a result, he
does not need actions that bring strife in their wake. (Epicurus, 1993, p. 72)
His proposal of pleasure as a guiding principle is not therefore a licence to live a

life of hedonism but, as Alain De Botton (2000) puts it, an understanding of what
makes us happy. Epicurus sees this understanding as every bit as fundamental as a
realisation of what makes us healthy. But he realises that human beings are bad at
appreciating these fundamentals, and so his philosophy is concerned with helping
us to understand just what does make us happy.
What we should seek to achieve is ataraxia. This is defined by Martha
Nussbaum (1994, p. 109) as ‘freedom from disturbance and anxiety’. Ataraxia
is the state in which we wish our soul to be free from pain just as we wish our
bodies to be so. These two elements, freedom from an anxious soul and freedom
from bodily pain, are, according to Epicurus, the two things that a person seeks.
Nussbaum states that, for Epicurus, the goal of an uncorrupted person is ‘the
continued undisturbed and unimpeded functioning of the whole creature’ (p. 109).
This shows what Epicurus means by pleasure, which is a freedom from pain
and disturbance. It is not hedonism, but rather a freedom to pursue our life without
mental or physical pain and suffering. Pleasure is the unimpeded functioning of a
person in terms of their body and soul. Part of this functioning is the use of reason,
which again mitigates Epicurus’s reputation for unthinking hedonism. Rather we
should actively be able to use all of our faculties and capabilities free from the
impediments of pain. However, this sense of reason is not an abstraction, but is
grounded in our normal daily activities. As Nussbaum states:
But what apparently would not be a part of the end [of human life] would be
any specialised or socially tutored use of reason, anything beyond its healthy
functioning as a faculty of the human animal. This ordinary use, Epicurus
frequently suggests, is closely tied to bodily functions and usually would consist
of awareness of and planning for bodily states. (p. 109, my emphasis)
This mention of ‘ordinary use’ is particularly interesting and useful for our
argument on acceptance. The ordinary is what we normally do as a matter
of course; it concerns that milieu that we are in the midst of (King, 2005). It
relates to the capability to maintain a normal life with routines and reiterated
practices grounded in common sense (Rosen, 2002) and our basic human
needs (King, 2003).
Epicurus, like philosophers from other rival schools of ancient philosophy,
such as Scepticism and Stoicism (Nussbaum, 1994), is concerned with controlling
desire and with the development of precepts that will achieve this control.
Nussbaum identifies two forms of desire in Epicurean thought. First, there is what
she terms ‘natural’ desires. These are ‘those whose appropriateness is witnessed
by their presence in the uncorrupted creature’ (1994, p. 111). An uncorrupted
creature is one that is normal and behaves according to its nature, and so these
desires can be seen as what it is normal and acceptable for a human being to have.
Second, Nussbaum identifies ‘empty’ desires, which she defines as the ‘products
of teaching and acculturation absent from the uncorrupted condition’ (p. 111). This
is part of what Epicurus refers to as ‘empty striving’, based on false beliefs or
vanity. As Nussbaum states, this empty striving arises in people:
… because they are infected with the falsity of the evaluative beliefs that
ground them; and also because they tend to be vain or self-defeating, reaching
out for a ‘boundless’ object that can yield no stable satisfaction. (Nussbaum,
1994, p. 112)
This empty striving for objects is boundless and we can find no end to it. The
person whose values are out of kilter with what is both necessary and possible
continues to strive for and to search for things, regardless of what they already
have or what their capabilities are. As Epicurus puts it himself: ‘Some men spend
their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realising
that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink’ (1993, p. 79). In
a later fragment he states: ‘We must not spoil our present estate by longing for
what is absent but realise that this too was one of the things we hoped for’ (p. 80).
His point is that we should not ruin or waste what we now have in a vain pursuit
for what we do not have. This striving is often pointless because it is constantly
renewed; once we have one thing we then strive for something else. Epicurus
Acceptance 101
states that we should remember that what we now have was, at some point in
the past, something we had hoped for. At one time we desired it and were able to
attain it. So what now makes it inadequate for our needs? If it is not good enough
for us now, what has changed? What has altered in the mean time to denigrate this
object or our desire for it? Rather than the object changing, might it not be that
it is we who have changed? Accordingly, Epicurus warns us against continually
striving for something new and states that we should be satisfied with what we
already have. When we first obtained these things, they were what we wanted,
they fulfilled us, they made us happy and they were enough for us, and if they were
able to satisfy us then, why should they not be able to now?
The problem, as Alain de Botton (2000, 2004) has argued, is that we strive
for that which is absent precisely because it is absent. We want it because we
currently do not have it, but others do. We feel that we have to compete and
that we must measure ourselves against others rather than according to what we
actually need. What we are suffering from is a comparative lack, or what De
Botton (2004) refers to as status anxiety. But in looking at what is absent and
hoping for something different from what we now have, we forget what it is we
do have. Instead what we have now is taken for granted; we see it as too ordinary
and seek to replace it with the extraordinary, to replace the common with the
designed. We forget why we have these ordinary things in our rush for the new
and different, but, in doing so, we end up with rather less than we had hoped for.
Because our striving is boundless and we continually struggle to reach the next
rung up the ladder, we never have what we hope for, but neither do we fully use
what we have. We fail to see the virtues of the things in front of us because we
are looking so far away.
Unlike ‘empty’ desires, which are boundless, ‘natural’ desires can be satisfied.
As Nussbaum states, for Epicurus, ‘the “natural” operations of desire “have a limit”
– that is, they can be filled up, well satisfied, and they do not make exorbitant or
impossible demands’ (p. 112). We can satisfy our desires, and do so without an
effort that is debilitating of our resources:
Their end is simply the continued healthy and undisturbed operation of the body
and soul of the creature. But this, Epicurus believes, can be achieved with finite
and usually modest material resources that are usually ready to hand. False social
beliefs, on the other hand, teach us not to be content with what is ready to hand,
but to long for objects that are either completely unobtainable (immortality) or
very difficult to procure (luxuries and delicacies) or without any definite limit
of satisfaction (the money-lover will never be satisfied with any definite amount
of wealth, the lover will never enjoy the possession he desires). The nature of
empty longing is, then, not ‘limited’, but ‘goes off into infinity’. (Nussbaum,
1994, p. 112)
Hence Nussbaum says that, for Epicurus, ‘much of our pain and all of our
anxiety come from corrupt ways of thought’ (p. 113). We do not appreciate that
what we properly need is already to hand, but instead insist on that which is far
off and difficult to attain. However, we need some means of dealing with these
‘corrupt ways’.
In developing such a means, Alain De Botton (2000) outlines a simple five-
stage method for gauging whether what we desire is ‘natural’ or ‘empty’. He bases
this method on one of Epicurus’s Vatican Sayings (no. 71): ‘The following method
of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long
for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished’ (Epicurus, 1993,
p. 84). De Botton states that, first, we need to ‘identify a project for happiness’
(p. 63), which may be a new house or a holiday. Second, we should ‘imagine that
the project might be false. Look for exceptions to the supposed link between the
desired object and happiness. Could one possess the desired object but not be
happy? Could one be happy but not have the desired object?’ (p. 63). So would
the new house make us happy? What if we spent all this money and committed
ourselves and found that it did not improve our life as we had hoped? The third
stage is to reflect that ‘if an exception is found, the desired object cannot be a
necessary and sufficient cause for happiness’. So if we were to feel that we would
be happy in our old house as long as we were with someone we loved, then why
are we moving? This leads to the fourth stage, which states that, ‘in order to be
accurate about producing happiness, the initial project must be nuanced to take the
exception into account’ (p. 64). So we need to state that we would be happy in the
new house only if we were with those we loved. This leads us to the concluding
fifth part: ‘True needs may now seem very different from the confused initial
desire’ (p. 64): our happiness depends on those whom we love and their being
with us rather than having the new house, and so we should question whether we
actually do need it.
The key issue, then, is the idea of ‘boundlessness’, of not realising what it
is possible for us to achieve, but persisting with the idea that we can never have
enough. As Epicurus states, and this quote almost sums up his philosophy:
Acceptance 103
Happiness and blessedness do not belong to abundance of riches or exalted

position of offices or power, but to freedom from pain and gentleness of feeling
and a state of mind that sets limits that are in accordance with nature’. (p. 101)
We must always be striving for more, continually desiring better, and therefore
always falling short, never being sated or able to rest. Instead of taking this view,
and following De Botton’s five-point plan, we should restrict ourselves to ‘natural’
striving, concentrating only on those things that are necessary, possible and
achievable. What this means is that we set ourselves limits or, in other words, we
accept some state as being normal and say that it is enough for us. This involves
coming to terms with our limits, with what we have now, with what we need now,
and with what we can achieve. It is about being aware of our horizon and ensuring
that this is close to us and that it encloses what we need. In other words, it is about
our acceptance of our place.
What stops us accepting our place is our ‘corrupt thinking’, our not thinking
straight about what we can and ought to have and do. We forget to place limits on
our desires and instead aim too far off: we seek for that which is unrealistic. And
this is corrupting because it harms us in the present. We become dependent on our
dreams and aspirations and we lose the ability to support ourselves as we are.
Thus much of what Epicurus states is about living in the present. We should
not look for gods or idols. We should not fear what we cannot control, and we
should not hope for things that are absent, for what we cannot have. The present
is what we do have, where we are and where the limits of the possible are clear.
What is important is to recognise what is sufficient to our lives. This is shown
particularly well in Jacques Tati’s film, Mon Oncle (1958), with the contrast in
the dwellings of the Arpels and Hulot. The Arpels’ house is in the international
style, rationally designed according to a particular image of the modern, such
that its use has to be moderated to suit its design. The furniture is uncomfortable
and the house appears bare and unwelcoming. In contrast Hulot’s dwelling,
an apartment, has an almost organic quality about it. It is at the top of an old
tenement and can only be reached by a complicated series of steps up, down and
across. The house appears to have been developed in a haphazard and piecemeal
fashion to suit the needs of the moment. Hulot’s dwelling is not trying to make
any statement; it is not aspiring towards something. Rather, it just is.1 This film
helps us to recognise what dwelling is for, and what it does for us. It reminds us
1 I have discussed this film in more detail in The Common Place (2005).
in its gentle way of what happens if we lose sight of functions: like the Arpels,
we might become anxious about what others think of us and whether we appear
as we should. The problem for them, the cause of their anxiety, is not any failure
on their part, but an unpreparedness to accept only a sufficiency. They cannot
accept that for dwelling to work well, it has to be ordinary (King, 2005). As I
argued in The Common Place, the Arpels are examples of a ‘lack of acceptance’
(p.99). This occurs when:
… we are not prepared to accept what we have, and hence we try to design
something new out of our existing environment. We feel that, because the
dwelling is ours and is therefore special to us, we should make it distinctive and
special in itself. Yet what is actually special about this dwelling is that it contains
us and our own, and this is sufficient in itself. (King, 2005, p. 99)
We should concentrate not on the dressing or the veneer, but on what is

necessary – what is enough – and come to appreciate that it is this that makes
dwelling work. The extras – when they are there – may or may not get in the
way, but the yearning for them when they are absent will damage us as it
prevents us from enjoying what we have. A dwelling that is sufficient to our
needs will not be basic in an absolute sense. It will not be lacking in terms of its
amenities. Rather it is that which enables us to meet our normal ends, without
imposing on others and without invading their privacy. The sufficient, then, is
that which is our ordinary and commonplace environment (King, 2005).
Epicurus is concerned that we remain within bounds and keep ourselves
grounded; that we live according to what is necessary and essential in our life. He
argues that certain things are easily obtained and this ease is for a reason. Likewise,
difficult things are difficult for a purpose and not without cause. What we need
is already all around us and comes to us without our striving. What we need is
the ordinary world of taken-for-granted things, as opposed to the extraordinary
imaginings of desire, the absent and unobtainable. It calls to our attention the
significance of the thereness of dwelling as an entity that we are in the midst of, of
that which is common and ready to hand for us (Heidegger, 1962).
We can see Epicurus as being concerned to eradicate desire or, more properly,
the ill effects of desire. He seeks to deal with the unrealisable and to persuade us
to lead a life that is both reasonable and tenable, a life that is in keeping with our
environment, our surroundings and our fellows, and which is based on what we
have around us, not on what we cannot easily obtain.
Acceptance 105
Epicurus suggests that we should withdraw from public life. To withdraw

means to exclude ourselves from certain activities and the wider society, from
public affairs and politics. But it also suggests that we exclude the outside world
from our daily affairs so that it has no part in what we might do. What this
suggests is a separation between public and private, between what we do and the
competitive public realm beyond us. It is about putting a barrier between what
we can readily control and what is beyond our reach. Of course we are still in the
world, we are a part of it, inextricably linked with others and the affairs beyond our
boundaries: the world beyond us helps to define these boundaries and so to shape
our actions. Yet we should still seek to restrict the influence of the public realm,
with its certainties and generalisations about how we should live. We should try
to maintain the boundaries between ourselves and the public realm, and keep
some control over the way we perceive the world and how we are perceived by
it. Epicureanism therefore should be seen as concerned with maintaining control,
and this is why we continue to point to the importance of sufficiency and limiting
the striving for what is absent and beyond us. Epicureanism is about being able to
locate ourselves and remain within a defensible and definable sphere; it is about
limiting ourselves to the possible, not desiring what might well be beyond us and
will cause us pain.
There is a connection here with the concept of side-constraints, as discussed
by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). Side-constraints can be
defined as limits to our own actions in order to preserve the rights of others. In turn,
therefore, we depend on the side-constraints placed on others to allow us to fulfil
our own ends. These side-constraints permit the integrity of individual actions to
be sustained, maintained and further developed. We can see side-constraints as
boundaries that are erected around us as a result of the self-restraint of others. But
because the action of others also results in the creation of boundaries, it is linked
to the social and the political. And crucially, there is a mutuality here, whereby we
respect the interests of others as the price we pay for our own rights. By placing
limits on ourselves, we ensure that our own rights are protected and maintained.
The idea of side-constraints, when properly understood, is a sign of mutuality
rather than atomism: it is a way of characterising the social as being composed of
individuals who demonstrate responsibility for each other’s freedoms by placing
limits on themselves.
The important element here is that of limits to the self, of putting limits on
our own actions. Epicurus sees the important discipline in life – the therapy – as a
self-limitation, as a knowledge of what is enough and what is too much. We need
to remain aware of what breaches the boundaries of others and ourselves, and
so becomes impossible to manage because we can no longer keep things in their
place. By placing limits on ourselves, we may well succeed in fulfilling our ends,
in achieving more than we would otherwise. This is because the ends that we then
devise are themselves bounded. They are limited and thus realistic: their aim is
sufficiency rather than any maximal outcome.
But while this notion of limits can be seen as a form of withdrawal from the
social and the political, it is also the very thing that makes society and the political
possible. This is because boundless striving can be oppressive to others. Our
striving can override the ends of others if we are more powerful, more aggressive
or more clear-sighted in our desire than they are. Boundless striving, we can argue,
leads to a disregard of the other, to a blinkered and ignorant refusal or inability to
accept the needs and rights of others. It leads to our failure to acknowledge any
constraints on ourselves, to see any need for limits. We are too self-absorbed, self-
centred and irresponsible to see the effects of our striving, and so it leads to a lack
of sympathy with the other and a concern only for ourselves. In the jargon of post-
structuralism (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988), ‘empty’ striving can be equated with
transgression or the radicalisation of desire aimed at breaching the conformity
of the bourgeois order. The effect, however, is to transgress the rights of the
weak and the powerless, even as we might claim to be furthering their interests
(King, 2004, 2005).
The importance of the therapy of limits can be further explicated by looking in
more detail at the idea of sufficiency and, in particular, at the differences between
self-sufficiency and sufficiency for ourselves. Superficially the terms appear to be
similar, but there are significant differences. Self-sufficiency means ensuring that
we deal with our own needs ourselves: it means being independent. Sufficiency for
ourselves is having enough for our requirements, but is not necessarily obtained
by ourselves; we need not be independent of others, and we might indeed be
very reliant on them. Both concepts, however, deal with the placing of limits.
In the case of self-sufficiency, we are limiting the processes of provision and
consumption; with sufficiency for ourselves we are limiting the levels of provision
and consumption. Of course limiting the processes might also, and probably would,
limit the level as well. Yet this is not the purpose, which is first and foremost
control over processes. Likewise, we might minimise our reliance on others by
limiting the level of consumption but, again, this is not the main purpose.
The key difference, however, is that one concept – self-sufficiency – is
concerned particularly with withdrawing from the world in the attempt to create
Acceptance 107
our own subsistence, whilst the other – sufficiency for ourselves – retains a level
of relation with others in seeking to control the level at which we subsist: we limit
ourselves for the sake of others as much as for ourselves. Sufficiency for ourselves
is therefore both a relational and a relative notion: it is concerned with how we
relate to others as well as being dependent upon what we feel we can legitimately
have – what we need and can justify – and about what we feel is good for us
and helps us to flourish. It is to understand what can reduce anxiety, insularity
and isolation, whilst retaining the necessary privacy, intimacy and security of
dwelling. What is important is that we examine our actions, keeping in mind the
distinction of Epicurus regarding the necessary and the unnecessary, the natural
and the empty.
Therefore I would contend that the idea of sufficiency for ourselves is
concerned with how we use limits. We need to recognise that we are bounded and
not boundless. What is foremost in our minds is what is achievable and has been
achieved, and what is necessary and fits within natural boundaries. Of course we
need to be aware of what is sustainable, but also of what is sustaining, to be aware
of what fortifies us as well as what endures. Part of this – and this links with the
idea of side-constraints – is that we do not lose sight of the needs of others and that
nor do we impinge upon them. We should neither ignore nor coerce others.
The world is like a web, where everything is in touch with something else. Nothing
is independent. I am part of this web: I may see myself as being at the centre, with
things contacting me and emanating out from me; I take myself as being central
and act accordingly. But in a continuous web there is, properly speaking, no centre;
there is no objective centre around which everything else revolves or resolves
itself. We are all actually at what might be called the periphery, our ‘centre’ is at
the periphery of a totality; actions are always taking place elsewhere, others are
always more important than we really are, or so it will appear to us when we are
lucid and honest.
There is, we might say, a tension between our sense of centrality, of our belief,
or delusion, of being at the centre, on the one hand, and our recognition – which
we may hold at the same time or only when we are disabused of our illusions
– that we are insignificant, that things occur without us, despite us and regardless
of us. Acceptance of the world does not implicate us in the world’s entire goings-
on. It is rather a means of associating us with the world, of helping us to understand

that ‘world’ and ‘us’ are not distinct or different entities: acceptance means we
recognise that we are made of the stuff of the world.
What makes this manageable is that we focus on what is close to us, and
what we focus on remains close to us. It is important because it is close, and
close because it is important. And of course only part of the world is close to us.
We cannot hold it all close to us; we cannot focus on all of it; and we can only
understand but a fraction of it.
What we know of the world derives from those parts of it that are close, from
the bits of it that touch us. What we know of the world is because of our connection
with it. Hence we may know a little or a lot: we may know of things at some
distance because of where we have travelled; or we may know only things that we
have stayed near to. But all our actions are world-disclosing. As we proceed, we
open up the world; we proceed as part of it, developing it, like a ripple in a pool,
not distinct from it, but standing out for a time before being subsumed again to
the whole. Ripples are not separate from the pool but are the effect of some action
within the pool.
So acceptance, which begins with the personal and ripples out, becomes, in
its way, political. It shows how we view others as well as ourselves. It sets out
the limits for our actions and what we should do for others and well as ourselves.
Acceptance is the antimodern condition, whereby we reject the modernist ideal of
progress and perfectibility. The beauty of the concept of acceptance is precisely
what it encloses. It allows us to move beyond the assumptions of modernity, and
we can do so positively. We can reject modernity in favour of something else. We
are not being nihilistic or relishing in contrariness and rejection. Instead what we
are doing is showing that there is an alternative to modernity and that this does not
involve the flights of fancy of postmodern thought. We can stay grounded while
criticising the modern. We can hold our position without seeking to transgress or
to destroy. What we are saying is that we wish to keep what we have and we wish
to do so because we know what it does for us. We know we need nothing more
than this and this understanding arises out of experience. Our complacency is not
groundless but based on an honesty that comes from a clear vision of what is close
rather than scouring the horizon for what we hope might one day appear. The
antimodern condition allows us to make that most peaceful of political statements:
‘I know my place’.
Chapter 7
In November 2011 a young woman, Emma West, was arrested after being filmed
conducting a racially abusive tirade on a tram from Croydon to Wimbledon. Her
language was foul, she was directly offensive to several people in the carriage, and
it was clear that her rant was causing considerable offence and distress to other
passengers, both black and white. As she ranted her young son was sitting on her
lap, looking somewhat bemused and not a little frightened by the whole affair.
This was both a throwback to a different age when openly racist abuse was
common, but it was also a very modern incident, being recorded on someone’s
mobile phone and then broadcast via social media sites to a wide audience. The
result of this broadcast was that the woman was arrested and charged with racially
aggravated behaviour. So what we might see as a relatively rare event in Britain,
at least when compared to the 1960s and 1970s, was seen widely and caused a
considerable controversy.
But what I found particularly interesting was the response of many on the right
to this event. The mainstream right-wing press was consistent in its condemnation
of West and supported her arrest. But views on social media sites were different.
Of course there was the extreme reaction, seeing West’s rant as the focal point
for what they saw as the growing resistance against multiculturalism and the
supposed attack on Britishness. Others were thankful to her for stating what ‘the
majority’ supposedly thought but were too cowed to state publicly. However,
others, more moderate perhaps, argued that it had been wrong to arrest her, with
some suggesting that this was a form of ‘soft totalitarianism’ in which individuals
who did not agree with the modern progressive consensus were being forcibly
silenced. Doubtless some of these commentators also agreed with her sentiments,
but many focused on her apparent right to say what she did and the reaction of the
state in arresting her. In particular, they contested that if a person is not able to give
offence then free speech is dead.
There may be some who consider themselves to be antimodernist or
traditionalist who would support West’s sentiments and agree that Britain should
be a country only for white people. This is an argument that is easily dismissed
intellectually, if not at the more emotional level at which these debates tend to
take place. As I stated at the very start of this book, I concur with the view of
Eric Voegelin (1997) who takes the ideas of race and nation as being modernist
rather than in any way traditional. But what I want to focus on here are those
commentators who place the right to offend above the effect of offensive speech.
What I want to ask is why would someone wish to defend West’s right to say
whatever she pleased, regardless of the context in which she found herself and the
sensibilities of the other people present, in this case a crowded tram full of people
of different ethnic backgrounds? Why would people wish to support her right to
free speech regardless of the offence, and without regard to the inappropriateness
of her behaviour in front of her young child? Why would we seek to defend
behaviour that was clearly uncivilised on the grounds of an abstract principle?
What, we might ask, is the point of such principles if they are causing distress to
many others? On what basis can the egoism of one person be placed above the
individuality of all those around her? Clearly, if we were to agree with West’s
sentiments and are only using free speech as cover (which I fear some were), then
none of this matters. But if the support for her is on the general liberal principle,
then what does this say about our sense of sociability and responsibility if we are
prepared to put the right of one person over and above those of others?
The problem with this liberal view is that it ignores, or rather refuses to
accept, that the interests and actions of individuals are often incommensurable,
and therefore attributing abstract rights to individuals, regardless of the context in
which they might use them, is deeply problematical. Rights, as with much else in
social life, clash and the exercising of rights is a competitive business. This means
that there is the distinct possibility of some people ending up as winners and others
as losers. It is a rather one-sided form of individualism, that focuses only on what a
person might do and not on how these actions might be received and affect others.
This ‘Robinson Crusoe’ view, which attaches rights to a single person as if no
one else matters, ignores the fact that one person’s actions impinge directly and
concretely on those around them. In other words, it allows one person’s rights to
override everyone else’s, and it does so because the whole notion of rights is built
on an abstraction.
Both this incident and the reaction to it tell us something about modernity. First,
we had a young woman who believed she could say what she liked, regardless of
the effect, and then we had a number of commentators on the right of politics, who
defended her right to say it, claiming that this was demonstrative of a clear set of
principles. But in both cases the result is to suggest that abstractions matter rather
The Antimodern Condition 111
more than real people and that because of this, the views of one person are taken
to be more important than the feelings of the rest of her fellow citizens. But the
outcome, as was clear to see from the film of the incident, is distress and conflict.
This incident is modernity in microcosm. This is what happens when egoism is
taken as the norm rather than the unfortunate exception.
But why were the actions of the young woman so wrong? We can argue that
her specific sentiments were foul and objectionable, but I want to be more general
here. What was wrong with West’s statements was that they offended our sense of
the familiar. Her rant attacked our values and sense of propriety: they denigrated
any sense of commonality and connectedness. We take it as important that we are
concerned for others and that they are due equal respect. Accordingly, when we
see someone ranting at our fellow citizens, we too feel threatened by this offensive
and degrading behaviour. Of course there will be those who agree with West or
defend her right to say what she will, but they do this on the basis of abstract
ideals, whether they concern race or free speech, rather than on that of the specific
reactions of real people. What most of us respond to, I would suggest, is the fact
that gratuitous offence caused to others also offends us.
As a result of this offence we realise there must be some limits to individual
rights. We may not find this situation ideal or even comfortable, but we accept that
there must be limits, some side constraints placed on others. It is interesting that
this idea of side-constraints was developed by a libertarian, Robert Nozick (1974).
His book of course is seen as one of the great defences of individual rights. Yet, it
is seldom considered just how considerable these side constraints would need to
be to properly restrain others and protect individual rights. I would suggest that
the result would be a rather more comprehensive set of prohibitions than most
libertarians would like to admit. I would venture to say it would mean that West’s
rant would be seen to be impermissible. It might be argued that any side-constraint
should be voluntary and that we would hope that West would not have allowed
herself to say what she did, and indeed this would have been the ideal. Yet, self-
restraint is clearly insufficient, and anyway, the case made by supporters of free
speech specifies precisely that if someone has said something, then it should be
defended on principle, and that to sanction someone for her statements is a form
of totalitarianism. So the side-constraints have to come from outside, just as the
offence is external.
What I would suggest is that the extremity of the behaviour of this woman
actually diminishes the principle of free speech and shows the problem of placing
abstractions above actual relations. The actions of West were such that we question
why anyone would wish to defend such actions. The same would apply to the
example of paedophilia: why would we wish to use rights to defend the violation
of a child? By ignoring any effect of an action, the defence of an individual’s right
can be seen merely as justifying the use of one person by another. It gives licence
to those who wish to use others for their own benefit and who see themselves to
be above or superior to them. This, I would suggest, is a natural consequence of
modernity. The licence to act as we will rejects what is meaningful in society and
makes the complacency of the familiar impossible. It destroys our connections
with others, reducing them to mere elements of critique, as heretics, outsiders,
non-humans. And the consequences of this are always palpable and do not remain
abstract.
Modernity, as I have shown, is based on abstractions, of which the major one is
that we should favour progress over tradition. Instead of accepting what we know
and what is familiar to us, we are told to strive for and aspire to achieve something
that is not yet currently present. We are told the future will be better and so we find
the present to be unsatisfactory. But of course the future is always just ahead of us,
tomorrow always stays where it is and so what we are left with is disillusion: the
present is not enough but the future never comes. This is due to the portrayal of
progress as an end in itself. Progress is based on unquestioned premises that direct
us to aspire for its own sake.
The antimodern condition is therefore a statement against progress and the
idea of human perfectibility. It is profoundly anti-utopian in that it rejects the idea
that we should sacrifice the present in favour of the future. History tells us that
the search for human perfectibility is both futile and highly dangerous. Moreover,
we only have one life, and we have ends to meet in the present so why should we
sacrifice this for a hypothetical future?
What are more concrete to us are the traditions that our culture is based on.
These have created the sense of familiar that provides us with some comfort. They
are social practices that have stood the test of time and help us to locate ourselves
and to maintain a sense of home. We have inherited these traditions from our
ancestors and we are charged with passing them on. In this way we link with the
sacred and create a continuity of purpose based on what we share with those who
are now dead and those yet unborn. These traditions ground us and provide us
with a sense of home. They keep things close to us and they do this by imbuing
our surroundings with meaning. It is in this way that we can understand what is
around us.
Being antimodern, we focus on the surface of things. We do not believe that

there are any hidden structures below everyday reality. There are no necessary
outcomes dictated by history. History has no purpose and there are no means
by which human destiny can be determined. The antimodernist knows that any
attempts to explain history and to reduce all knowledge to the material level are
merely strategies to explain outcomes that do not fit preconceived theoretical
assumptions. The world is as we see it and its nature is open to us.
We have no desire to repudiate the past or to destroy those institutions built
by our ancestors. We acknowledge that they were building for us, as well as for
themselves. We reject any sense that we are more advanced than those who have
preceded us or that we are in any position to judge them. Rather we acknowledge
that we are the mere repositories of their achievements and that we would be
nothing without them. This leaves us with an epistemological modesty. We are
where we are not because of ourselves but as a result of the labours of others. But
we are also aware that there is much we do not know. As René Guénon (2001b,
2001c, 2001e) has argued, we are guilty of forgetting the traditions that have made
us into what we are. We have lost knowledge that was commonly known in the
past and there are skills that are now beyond us. The effect of progress in the West
has been to favour the material over the spiritual, such that we can only appreciate
what we can quantify and measure. Much that is spiritual and non-material has
been lost, and we are foolish enough to believe that this represents a progression.
We believe we have gone through a renaissance and enlightenment when in fact
we have regressed to a more primitive form of life.
Likewise, following Edmund Burke (1999), we expect to make no discoveries
in morality and politics. We do not believe that we will find a new morality or a
better means for governing society. Instead we believe that we can understand
our actions through the template handed down to us by our ancestors and that we
can govern ourselves through the established forms that have stood the test of
time and proven their utility. We do not seek to avoid all change but see change
as a necessary evil, which can only be sanctioned if it protects or corrects existing
institutions. Longstanding institutions have a proven purpose and utility, and this
is to be preferred to any attempt to build new modes of governing based on abstract
principles. This means that we should not feel the need to justify or explain the
past. Rather we should understand that the past justifies and explains us.
We know that most attempts at change will fail and that therefore progress is
based on a misplaced optimism. An antimodernist can only be optimistic about the
past, where things are known with certainty and we can learn things about ourselves
without undue speculation. However, we know that the past is fundamentally

different from the future. The past is closed and settled, while the future is open
to possibility. Following Joseph de Maistre (1993), we take a pessimistic view
of human nature. Human beings are fallen creatures who do not always act for
the best of motives. They fall below their expectations and those of others. They
commit crimes and act for venal motives. Even when they act benignly, they may
still fail to achieve their ends and fall short of their expectations. However, there
is a tendency not to learn from this but instead to maintain the desire for progress,
despite the known consequences of past actions. The past, we might say, consists
of the failures of progressive attempts to improve the world, and so we should seek
to limit ourselves. We know that change will always be unpredictable and quite
possibly uncontrollable. We are aware that it is easier to destroy than to create; that
once we start to dismantle longstanding institutions, we cannot rebuild them; and
that once we set up new institutions, we also know that they will develop in ways
that we could not possibly predict.
Society has no end point and no purpose other than its own continuance. The
purpose of any society is to transmit knowledge and traditions from one generation
to the next. It is this knowledge and these traditions that allow individuals to
flourish and prosper. But this is not because these individuals have licence to
remake or to discard what has been inherited. Rather they flourish because of what
has been gifted to them. And so we should see each individual as the repository
of a society’s knowledge and that it is thus their duty to preserve this and pass it
on. Our principle aim therefore should be to protect and support our own culture.
The key problem with modernity is that it forces us always to look forwards
and never to accept where we are now. But the failure that naturally follows creates
a sense of anxiety. We are told that we should aspire to change, but we tend to fall
short and so judge ourselves, and others, harshly. Thus we can say that anxiety is
the symbol of modernity. This anxiety manifests itself through egoism, where we
place ourselves above others. We are right to recognise our own uniqueness, but
we fail to recognise the uniqueness of others. We place ourselves at the centre of
things and so tend to use others as commodities. We do things because of what
they supposedly say about us, and this arises out of the imperative to aspire.
The antimodern condition, however, is one in which aspiration is replaced by
complacency. Our sanguine acceptance of the world and our place in it allows us to
find some comfort. We find solace in the banality of the ordinary and complacency
helps us to assuage the implacability of the world. We can face the materiality of
the world through our meaningful relationships with things. We find ourselves
absorbed by a world of meaningful things and so we find we can absorb these

elements into our ordinary lives.
But the very essence of the antimodern condition, and the endpoint of our
journey, is acceptance. To be antimodern is to accept what we are and where we
are. We know that we need fixed points to relate ourselves to the world. We put
down roots and traverse well-worn ruts that keep us located. We depend on a
sense of stability and permanence and through this we can be complacent within
the world. Acceptance is indeed the opposite of aspiration. It is where we can
accommodate the needs of others as well as our own. We are able to see the world
as others do and come to terms with things as they are rather than as we would
like them to be.
The rejection of aspiration means that we are able to know when we have
enough and to appreciate what it means to have a sufficiency for ourselves. We
know that we should limit ourselves and the principle reason for this self-constraint
is that others too have needs. In limiting ourselves, we allow others the freedom
to act. We recognise not only that society depends on freedom, but that freedom
depends on order. This sense of order comes from the constraints that are placed
on each of us.
The antimodern condition is concerned with maintenance. It is about keeping
things going, in the short term so that we can remain complacent and secure, but
also over the long term so that our culture can continue in a manner that we would
recognise and appreciate. There is no end to this process and its purpose is its
own continuance. This becomes clear when we reiterate the four presumptions of
antimodernism we discussed in chapter one. The first presumption is that instead of
being concerned with what is new and different, we wish to focus on the accepted
and habitual ways of acting and doing. We have a rhythm to our lives and we take
this as normal and proper. This has developed over time and we have adopted it
without any conscious act of will. It is not based on anything rational and is not
amenable to rational assessment and critique. It is something we have inherited
and accept because of who, what and where we are. Accordingly, we will resent
being pushed out of this rhythm and resist those who seek to force us to accept
what is new and different. This is essentially the notion of acceptance, with its
subsidiary concepts of complacency and accommodation.
Second, these accepted and habitual ways of behaving lead us to believe that
there is a common culture of which we are a part. This connects us with others
around us and gives us a sense that we share something greater than ourselves.
There are particular ways of behaving and responding that mean we belong to
this greater whole. This common culture predates us and will reach beyond us
and this makes us a part of something with a continuity and a significance that
transcends our everyday concerns. This sense of allegiance, however, does not
negate differences between us, nor does it mean that we will not sometimes feel
separated or even alienated from others. However, the common culture ties us to
others and determines our response to them and, in turn, how we expect them to
act with regard to us. This sense of commonality may remain implicit and appear
merely as part of the accepted and habitual. However, it may become explicit if it
is challenged or threatened either from within or without.
The third element takes the idea a stage further in that it stresses that the culture
remains common only by making its transmission from one generation to the next
a priority. One of the principal elements of a common culture is the regard for its
own continuance. This is the only means by which the accepted forms of acting
may be preserved and our lives continue on unchallenged. The key institutions
of that culture need therefore to be geared towards its reproduction through the
transmission of knowledge and understanding.
This takes us to the fourth and final element, in that we see the principal aim of
government as being the protection of those institutions that transmit the common
culture. The aim of government should be to maintain those institutions, traditions
and practices that allow the common culture to thrive.
As I stated in Chapter 1, these presumptions or principles form a whole which
creates a defensive mechanism against progress. But what should now be apparent
is that the starting point from which we build this mechanism is actually the notion
of acceptance. This is what we need in order to develop the other parts of our
defence. So we might say that my entire argument has been to establish the basic
premise of the antimodern. But in doing so, we now appreciate the continual or
reiterative nature of the antimodern condition. What we are building is not a means
to get anywhere, but merely the means to stay in place.
So acceptance is both the start and the end of the antimodern condition. When
we accept our place, we are rejecting the notion of progress. This is not, however,
a rejection of the world. Acceptance, and the antimodern condition itself, is based
upon one overriding concern: what matters for us is home. We need to feel that
we are located in a special place, that we have put down roots. The antimodern
condition, then, is about our need to keep things close to us and our deep desire to
retain that proximity. It is therefore without doubt an inward-looking idea. But in
looking inwards, it does not ignore the world as it is, nor is it a rejection of it. It is
rather a way of seeing, of looking at the world through the window of one’s own
home. It is framed by the familiar, by what is known and what we feel close to. It
is a gaze that is so full of possibility. As Franz Kafka states:
It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even
listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself
to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.
(Kafka, 2006, p.108)
Conclusion
René Guénon, in his book Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (2001d),
argues that we should favour knowledge over action. By this he means that the
spiritual is superior to the temporal and this would be recognised in a traditional
society, in which the warriors would defer to the priests. He states that it is only in
societies that have forgotten their traditions that action is placed over knowledge
and the temporal over the spiritual.
This, like many of Guénon’s statements, can be contested on grounds of
historical accuracy: were societies in India, China, Egypt and pre-Renaissance
Europe really like this? Guénon’s argument in Spiritual Authority and Temporal
Power is deliberately general and does not refer to many concrete examples
to substantiate his position. As is typical of his work, he insists on basing his
argument on the general situation rather than on specific examples. However, to
use a statement frequently made by Mark Sedgwick (2004) in his study of Guénon
and traditionalism, this question about historical accuracy is to miss the point of
Guénon’s work. Guénon is not trying to put forward an academic argument any
more than any other other work of religion or speculative philosophy is. What he
is trying to do is to deal with what he takes to be an important truth. For Guénon,
the matter of the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal is not open
for academic debate: it has been settled already by an understanding of traditional
doctrine, and so what is left is to state this as clearly as possible to a world that has
forgotten these truths.
This of course will not satisfy many academics, who may feel that this is merely
an attempt to skip around what is legitimate criticism. But whether Guénon’s point
on the primacy of the spiritual is historically accurate or not, it does provide us
with an important lesson that I wish to draw on. The last chapter concluded with
the basic point that we should seek to remain in place and look out at the world
from the complacency of home. As Kafka (2006) states, we can let the world come
to us simply by sitting and waiting: we need do nothing and the world will be there
in front of us. The antimodern condition therefore is where we place knowledge
over action, and my argument has been about how we might achieve this now.
We can, I would suggest, understand the world better when we are settled. We
can take things in and can be receptive to what is around us and trying to make
itself known to us. This, then, is most definitely not a call for radical action or an
incitement to revolution. Instead it is where we place the intellect above action.
At the very beginning of this book I argued against radicalism and revolution,
stating that they had no place in conservative or traditional thought: it is simply
incompatible to claim to be both a conservative and a revolutionary. My vision of
the antimodern condition therefore is a quiet one. I have most certainly had targets
that I have sought to challenge, but my aim has not been to destroy them or to
mount any great onslaught against them. Nor do I intend this work to be seen as
a call to arms.
My view of the antimodern condition does not call for overt political action.
Instead it is intended as a statement on how we can and should live, individually
and collectively. I have left many of the arguments quite abstract and this is
because I do not wish to be prescriptive. The antimodern comes in many forms and
depends on many facets. My aim has been to show what is wrong with modernity
and the idea of progress, and how we might live and act differently. But I have not
sought to provide any programme of action. Instead what I have hoped to offer
is an argument for an alternative way of looking at the world. What should be
clear is that what I am calling for is a change in perception, not for any reordering
of society. The perception must come first and then we can hope to see some
change in the way in which society is ordered. But the general acceptance of the
antimodern condition would not lead to the immediate transformation of society.
Over time the change would be appreciable, but the short-term effects would be a
greater inwardness and a more reflective approach to life on the part of individuals.
Of course it is the case that many do live like this already. What is lacking
is the general appreciation of it and some rebalancing towards this antimodern
perspective. In other words, what is needed is some recognition of how we actually
live rather than what we aspire to.
This book, then, is perhaps more of a description of a form of anti-politics.
Instead of calling for political action, it argues for a withdrawal to within the four
walls of our home. This is not so we can isolate ourselves, but rather a plea for
the acceptance of what makes our lives tenable and meaningful. Home is where
we are secure and feel complacent about what is around us. We can accept and
be accepted, and are free from the imperative to strive and aspire for what, for
most of us, will be unattainable and will only bring disillusion and discord to
ourselves and those close to us. This cannot be achieved by a political programme,
Conclusion 121
by radical action, or by any form of revolution. It can only be achieved through

knowledge and an awareness of what matters to us as individuals. The antimodern
condition is therefore, in case we were not already sure, a way of looking, a way
of understanding, and then an acceptance of what is already around us.
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Autumn Sonata (1978), directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Mon Oncle (1958), directed by Jacques Tati.
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Spring and Port Wine (1969), directed by Peter Hammond.
Woman of the Dunes (1964), directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Index
Acceptance viii, ix, 4, 10, 13, 53, 61, 69, Enlightenment 7, 15–23
70, 72, 74, 80, 81–108, 114–16, Epicurus 98–105, 107
120–21 Evola, J. x, 49
Accommodation 87–92, 97, 115
Antimodern, defined 8–9, 15–20, 26–7 Forgetting 29–48
Antimodern Condition, The, four Fukuyama, F. 49
presumptions of 18–20, 115–6
Anxiety 49–54, 58, 60, 64, 97, 99–102, Gray, J. 23–4
104, 107, 116 Guénon, R. viii, ix, 5, 11, 14, 31–48, 113,
Appleby, J. 96–7 119
Aspiration 29–31, 35, 48, 63–4, 69, 70–72,
88–97, 103, 114–15 Hadot, P. 98
Ataraxia 99 Hammond, P. 89–92
Autumn Sonata 67–9 Harmony 2–6, 26
Harvey, D. 22
Belloc, H. 25 Heidegger, M. 3, 53, 78
Benedict XVI 30
Benoist, L. 34–6 Implacability 6–7, 79–80, 84, 86–7, 93, 114
Bergman, I. 67–9 Irving, J. 70–72
Berlin, I. 15–17
Blandness 73–8 Jullien, F. 73–4
Burke, E. vii, x, 9, 10, 13, 14, 113
Kafka, F. 117, 119
Castells, M. 62–3, 65 Kahn, L. 65–6
Change 2–12, 14, 17, 20, 29–30, 38–9, Kahn, N. 65–6
43–4, 48–51, 75–7, 82–4, 94–7,
101, 113–14, 120 Le Corbusier 21–2
Chesterton, G. K. 25 Lyotard, J-F. 10, 22–3
Cioran, E. M. viii, 11, 61–2, 49–60
Complacency ix, xi, 73–80, 96, 108, 112, Materialism 35, 38–40, 46, 64
114, 115, 119 Modernity 1, 5–7, 8–9, 19–21, 24–5,
Counter-Enlightenment 15–24, 38, 41 31–48, 49–60, 61, 64–6, 69–72, 87,
93, 96, 108–112, 114, 120
De Benoist, A. x 18 Mon Oncle 103–4
De Botton, A 99, 101, 102–3 My Architect 65–6
De Maistre, J. vi, 16–20, 41, 57, 59, 60, 114
Dwelling 2–4, 6, 80–84, 103–4, 107 Nietzsche, F. 58
Norberg-Schulz, C. 3
Eliot, T. S. 25 Nozick, R. 105, 111
Elster, J. 75–6 Nussbaum, M. 98–102
Oakeshott, M. 13–14, 77 Sufficiency 106–7

O’Hear, A. 15, 20, 23
Tati, J. 103–4
Positivism 16, 23, 54 Teshigahara, H 81–9
Postmodernity 9–12, 22, 48–9 Tradition 5, 8–10, 13–21, 25–6, 31–48,
Prince of Wales 30 109–10, 112–14, 116, 119, 120
Progress 1–2, 4, 5–8, 11–26, 29–32, 36–48,
63, 78–81, 95–6, 108, 112–14, 116, Versluis, A 25
120 Voegelin, E. x, 24, 110
Radical x–xi Waterfield, R. 34, 36, 40–41

Revolutionary x–xi West, The 5, 31–48, 113
West, E. 109–12
Scruton, R. x, xi, 21 Widow for One Year, A 70–72
Sedgwick, M. 32, 33, 39, 46, 47, 119 Woman of the Dunes 81–9
Side-constraints 105, 111
Spring and Port Wine 89–92 Yeats, W. B. 25
Solovyov, V. viii, 61–64
Sontag, S. 50–51, 54–5 Zerzan, J. 25

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The Antimodern Condition

In memory of my dear brother and best friend,

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

7 The Antimodern Condition  109

aspects of multiculturalism (mainly as a result of working in the area during the

consequences. But as we are convinced we are always just on the threshold of

To concentrate on dwelling allows us to focus our actions in their fullness, on

Anyone arguing against progress has an immediate problem: one of credibility.

We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries

Burke here encapsulates much of the antimodern condition. Much of what we

those writers who see antimodernism as a radical, or even a revolutionary, position.

We make sense of our lives by looking backwards. Any society is grounded in

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer

Antimodernism is a product of the Enlightenment, or rather what rose to oppose

If the Enlightenment stressed reason, the Counter-Enlightenment stressed

We might summarise this distinction by stating that the Enlightenment sought

It saw individuals and communities as being grounded or rooted in their place

The rejection of revolutionary innovations was accompanied by a political

If antimodernism is a reaction, we need to consider, albeit briefly, what causes

dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational

preserve. To be antimodern is to focus on the past, on heritage, on harmony and on

The veneration of the past seems to be irrational. We cannot change things

Tradition was essentially the body of knowledge and self-understanding which

It is concerned with origins: tradition is the handing on of a complex of

philosophical systems, have this in common. However, they have developed

The civilization of the modern West appears in history as a veritable anomaly:

will of the individual is sublimated to the whole: ‘In a traditional civilisation it is

From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ conceptions tend toward

Guénon would never consider himself to be an explicitly political thinker. He does

The modern Westerner is moreover not content only to impose an education of

According to the traditional conception … each person must normally fulfil

He becomes as mechanical as the machine he is working. He must complete his

most modern technologies but, in doing so, we open ourselves up to anxiety,

Cioran’s universe of discourse is preoccupied with the themes of sickness

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet,

Likewise, he is aware of the contradictions inherent in his stance: ‘My mission

A strange transformation overcame people in Britain in the early years of the

or households in which both parents work. Support would not be provided to

This form of materialisation depends on our ability to dominate others. There

The blandness of things evokes in us an inner detachment. But this quality

Changing direction in the way we live is difficult. We may make resolutions, we

Acceptance is about coming to terms with what we have. It is where we are

evidenced by the use of the term ‘Epicureanism’ to denote a devotion to sensual

His proposal of pleasure as a guiding principle is not therefore a licence to live a

Happiness and blessedness do not belong to abundance of riches or exalted

We should concentrate not on the dressing or the veneer, but on what is

Epicurus suggests that we should withdraw from public life. To withdraw

on. It is rather a means of associating us with the world, of helping us to understand

The Antimodern Condition

Being antimodern, we focus on the surface of things. We do not believe that

without undue speculation. However, we know that the past is fundamentally

absorbed by a world of meaningful things and so we find we can absorb these

by radical action, or by any form of revolution. It can only be achieved through

Appleby, J. (2010): The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, New

Hadot, P. (2002): What is Ancient Philosophy?, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Harvard.

Autumn Sonata (1978), directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Oakeshott, M. 13–14, 77 Sufficiency 106–7

Radical x–xi Waterfield, R. 34, 36, 40–41

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7 The Antimodern Condition 109